Sports in Hell (6 page)

TLC was nonplussed. A thousand eyes watched her approach. A thousand eyes watched her reflexively toss her long blond hair back. A thousand eyes watched her sashay away. Five hundred lower jaws lost the will to close. It was a little creepy knowing that night when the lights went off, 500 guys were going to be recalling that same image.

Our female PR escort took us to the chapel room of the prison church, and there we were, face-to-face with four murderers. No guns are allowed inside Angola, including on the guards. It was just two women and a jittery sportswriter against four guys who could take us hostage in three seconds. Break off a table leg. Block the door. Yank a shiv out of a boot. Anything. What was I going to do, squirt them with my fountain pen?

But the more we talked to them, the more relaxed we got. These four were all going to be in the prison rodeo the next day. More than 11,000 people would be coming with the fervent hope of seeing them stomped, trampled, and gouged, which seemed just fine with these guys. “I ain't scared of no bull,” said Marlon (Tank) Brown, a spectacularly built twenty-nine-year-old black man from Baldwin, La., who was doing life for murder. “I don't mind playin' rough. I been playin' rough all my life. Hell, I hunted alligators. Alligators are worser 'n them.” The escort reminded Tank that two years ago he had his leg stomped upon and his jaw broken by a bull. “Whatever,” he shrugged.

Each man professed even less concern for his physical well-being than the last. “When that bull comes, I ain't leavin' the table for nothin',” said Jerry (Q-Tip) Tucker, a curly-haired white forty-three-year-old from Lodi, California, also in for murder. “Besides, the food's better in the infirmary.”

An Indian lifer named Rich (Injun) Sheppard, of Shreveport, La., said: “There ain't been a year I weren't hit doing the rodeo. I broke my wrist one time. I pulled my groin. I tore my shoulder and my bicep on a bull ride once. By the time the bull poker event comes around, I'm already hurt. But I ain't goin' to the hospital 'til it's over. No way. You got a whole year to get better.”

Turns out bull poker isn't the only suicidal event the inmates would be in the next day. There were seven others, each sounding more brutal than the last, including:

Bust Out, in which eight (8!) bulls and riders come flying out of the chutes at once, so that the prisoners have to survive not only their own bulls, but the hooves and horns of seven others. I didn't like their chances.

Wild Cow Milking, which sounds funny but may be the most dangerous of all. Eight teams of three inmates try to grab hold of a wild cow and milk it. First one to present a wet hand wins. “Them cows are worse than the bulls,” Injun stated. “They'll kick you sideways. And they'll come over and kick you just to get their friend free.”

Pinball, in which eight prisoners stand inside eight plastic hula hoops lying on the ground. The idea is not to leave your hoop when the bull tries to separate you from your pancreas. The last guy standing in his ring wins.

Wild Horse Race, in which inmates try to grab hold of a wild horse and ride him across a finish line. (The trick to controlling the horse? Bite his ear.)

Guts 'n' Glory, in which fifty inmates are in the ring when the bull is released. Tied between the bull's horns is a poker chip worth $500. Good luck trying to snatch it.

In short, it's a very good day if you own the local splint concession.

Why in the
hell
would somebody do any of this? Well, pride, for one thing. All their inmate buddies would be back at the prison watching them on closed-circuit TV, grading their falls on a scale of one (pussy) to ten (cheers from death row). “You can't turn yellow in front of those guys,” said Q-Tip. “You'll hear about it for a year.”

And don't forget the prize money. The year before, Tank won $200 in bull poker. What can you do with $200 in prison? Go to the commissary, where you can purchase such fine items as:

Also, the winner gets a real silver buckle with gold inlay. Plus, you're feted at the big steak-and-potato rodeo banquet and even your kids can come.

And how does one find the courage to win the bull poker buckle?

“I think about my bed,” Q-Tip says. “I just try to sit as still as I can and think about my bed.”

“I just pray not to be scared,” said Heywood (Ironhead) Jones, thirty-three, of Slidell, Miss., in for second-degree murder. “One year I saw two guys run and I don't want that to be me.”

“There ain't no point runnin' anyhow,” said Q-Tip. “'Cause the bull might veer at the last second and take the other guys out. You coulda won!”

Injun stated that you want to sit with your back to the chute. “That way you don't know he's comin'.”

Of course, that leaves you prey to mind games. “I might tell him wrong,” Q-Tip said. “I might go, ‘He's runnin' straight at you!' Maybe he'll flinch and that'll make the bull go at him, see?”

Personally I was shocked at such unethical behavior in an American prison.

Of course, Angola is unlike any prison on Earth—how many prisons do you know with their own nine-hole golf course?—mostly because of its Puckish warden, Burl Cain, a pudgy red-cheeked imp with long white curly hair. He has the look of a teamster elf. When we met him, he was wearing a baseball cap that read:
Angola: A Gated Community
.

Cain stirred folks up when he started giving inmates a proper burial, complete with horse-drawn hearse, band, and a solemn march to the prison graveyard. Critics howled that murderers didn't deserve it. Cain howled back louder. “The man has done his time,” he said. “The sentence was for life, not death, too. I'm not gonna kick his body.”

Cain does all kinds of odd things. He started a Returning Hearts Day in which any inmate can bring his kids onto the grounds and play with them for the whole day. He says there's good in all of his men. The trick is to find it.

“Like this fella that brought you them cookies,” he said, pointing at the deliciously gooey chocolate-chip morsel I'd just put in my mouth. “I call him Hop Sing. He's in for murder …”

I swallowed.

“… but he's a helluva cook.”

I looked at the small Vietnamese man through the kitchen door. He wore an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. He was chopping meat with a butcher knife. There were no guards and no guns between us and that knife.

I stopped swallowing.

“I asked Hop Sing once why he done it. He said, ‘Mr. Warden, a man whipped me two times. The third time, I was waiting with a gun. And Mr. Warden, once that automatic starts firin', it don't wanna stop.'”

Cain's rodeo is controversial, too. For one, people say it's just the lions vs. the gladiators in stripes. They say he's using the blood of the inmates to fill his coffers. Cain points out that (a) the inmates volunteer to do it, (b) nobody's died yet, and (c) most of the money goes to the inmates themselves. “These are men who've pretty much failed all their lives,” he said. “But when the rodeo is here, people are cheering them! That does a lot for a man.”

I suppose so. I just wondered what it would be like to be sitting in the rodeo and hear, “Hey, Mom! The guy who killed Dad just won Wild Cow Milking!”

Then there's the massive inmates crafts fair that comes with the rodeo—furniture, leather, and art, often sold by the inmate himself. Cain lets the minimum-security prisoners mix with the crowds, so you get inmate and citizen elbow to rib cage, over tables full of jewelry and bowls of chili. The inmates wear their usual: jeans, Timberland boots, and white T-shirts. The citizens wear their usual: jeans, Timberland boots, and white T-shirts. It can be a little awkward. Ironhead, for instance, makes his famous gumbo at the fair. One time, an old friend showed up at his booth. “Hey, man, I been lookin' all over for you!” the friend said. “Where you been?” And Ironhead looked at him and said, “Uh, in here.”

One of the biggest criticisms of Warden Cain is that he's too nice to the people he kills. That's when I made the mistake of asking him where it happens.

He took us into Angola's lethal-injection chamber. Death was so present in that room, on you like a fog, that it immediately brought Hop Sing's cookies about two-thirds up. It was a cinder-block room, maybe ten feet by fifteen feet, with the killing table laid out like a crucifix. There were six belts up and down the length of the table and more belts for the arms and hands. There was even a small pillow for the man's head. After all, what if he gets a stiff neck? There was a little square hole that led into another room, where the doctors dispense the sodium thiopental. This way they don't have to see the man they're killing. All of this is watched from a room with about twelve chairs through one-way glass.

“It takes about a minute and a half for the drugs to kill the man,” Cain said. “They usually take two breaths and they're gone. And then it's another four minutes for the heart to stop. But sometimes they'll surprise you. One ol' boy took his two breaths and we thought he was dead. And then, all of a sudden, he rose up and said ‘Wow!'”

The warden holds their hand through the whole process. (“Now, if it was an electric chair, I wouldn't do that,” he said.) Once the juice is flowing, he tells the man he has about ninety seconds and would he like to say one last thing? One man said, “Yeah, tell my lawyer he's fired.”

I asked Cain if he's for the death penalty.

He tilted his ball cap back on his head and thumbed his rosy chin awhile and said, “Well, if there's one thing I've learned is it's all about the jury and your lawyers. O.J. proved that money gets you off. You know the inmate who served you the cookies? He's done worse than what some of the men who died here have done, but it's all about the jury. The older I get, the less I know for sure.”

I asked about the red phone on the wall.

“That's for the governor,” he said. “There's a code word he's got to use. That way we don't get any tricks. One time it was ‘Exodus.'”

They use a generator so protesters can't cut the power. At one point, we heard an odd noise and Cain said, “That's the governor
on the generator.” And it made me think that sound could make for a terribly awkward moment some grisly day. The doomed man would be about to get the lethal dose when he'd hear an odd noise.

I could see TLC starting to turn white, so I asked if maybe we could get some fresh air. On the way out, yet another murderer, about fifty-five, was holding a taped-up box.

“Warden, can I borrow your knife?” the man said to Cain.

“Sure!” Cain said, happily handing over his gleaming six-inch pocketknife.

Inside my brain, I remarked, “Good Jesus!”

But the convict simply took the knife, opened the box, and handed it back to the warden.

I
really
needed a drink.

The next day was the biggie—the prison rodeo/craft fair—and if this isn't the weirdest craft show a person can go to, it'll do until one comes along.

First of all, how many craft fairs do you go to where, at the entry gate, they check under your car with a mirror, check in your trunk, and shine a flashlight on your floorboards? Inside was even stranger. Women with handbags were discussing clasps with guys who may have shot women in cold blood. Parents were putting their toddlers on ponies, to be led around a horse ring by grizzled men who may have fondled toddlers.

Sure was nice stuff, though. TLC and I bought two gorgeous oak rockers and a table from a guy doing life for armed robberies. We paid, get this, $200. Just before I gave him the cash, though, I
took TLC aside and said, “Yeah, but what if this guy never ships them?” And she looked at me for a second and said, “Where's he gonna go?”

Good point.

Inside the rodeo arena made my collar a little itchy, too. There was a whole stanchion of medium-security convicts who were kept separate from the rest of the crowd by a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence, like jackals at a zoo. The competing convicts were in a kind of holding pen, too, just above the bull chutes. They wore jeans and old-fashioned wide-striped black-and-white prison uniforms, à la
O Brother Where Art Thou?
There were plenty of guards, but still no guns. Every time a convict cowboy was introduced they added his hometown, which always drew whistles and hoots of joy. I couldn't quite understand that. “Lexington! Whoo-hoo! That's our rapist! Go get 'em, Lexington!!”

One thing I now know about a prison rodeo, there
will
be blood, and it flowed from the first minute. The first event was Bust Out and eight bulls came flying out of their chutes with eight wildly clueless convicts trying to hang on. Most didn't. Immediately, out of chute 2, a convict fell hard and then, to our horror, had his head stomped on by the bull who'd just come out of chute 3. Honestly, it couldn't have taken ten seconds. Then, in the madness of thirty-two hooves stamping and flying and kicking and bodies flying hither and yon, two convicts came out and tried to drag the poor guy off. They looked like soldiers trying to pull a buddy out of Vietcong fire. They finally got him into an ambulance, bound for a hospital in New Orleans. This was bad. The guy was too smashed up for the prison hospital. As the ambulance pulled out, I noticed the eyes on some of the convict cowboys get huge, followed by swallows, followed by quickly turning back to the action to steel themselves. I've seen that same look at professional bull-riding events. Fear strikes deep, whether there's a number on your back or not.