Best Friends
One thing you wouldn't expect to find much of in
prison is best friends. Unlikely as this may seem, the exact
opposite is true. In prison making a friend is as easy as
making eye-contact. Why, just this morning I almost made
a friend simply by having to walk by a person on my way
to the shower. This over muscled brown guy was lodged
on the narrowest part of the stairway. He had apparently
already used up his ration of toilet paper and was loudly
asking everyone else for theirs. He didn't know me, and I
didn't know him, but that one millisecond of eye-contact,
where my eyes said, "you get one chance to get out of the
street," he smiled his gap-toothed grin at me and asked,
"you got some toilet paper?" Right then he was my best
friend, until I said, "no." He moved over to the side, then
waited until I was almost in the shower, and said,
"Guess I may just have to take me
some toilet papers from some where."
Yes, in prison, friends abound. The ones I like the best are
the ones who study Caucasian behavior, then mimic it back
at us when they want something. A man can get a fine,
warm, western hemisphere, old-style handshake, if he
doesn't mind being asked for some coffee before the
greeter's grip relaxes.
Some of my most fond memories of prison have
occurred when one guy I've had to entertain moved out and
was replaced by another stranger. The Funny New Guy
(F.N.G. for short, since it happens so often) reveals himself
fairly quickly. First, there is his appearance. Generally, the
more disfigured his physique, the more bad news he will
bring you. If only his back arms are swollen and too large
for his body, he is often not far from normal. If his biceps
and triceps are bloated-up, you may have someone with
moral or psychological problems. If his muscles are so
puffed-up and deformed that it looks like his shoulders are
trying to suck down his tiny head, odds are that the guy is a
trouble magnet. If he is also covered with raggedy,
amateurish, permanent skin graffiti, especially gang signs
that have been scribbled out, you should make ready for
waves of disaster after catastrophe. You get confirmation
of the crisis when the guy arrives with nothing and tells
you, "what's mine is yours pal!" This is usually followed
by, "wow-wee! I'm starving; when do we eat around here?"
These types of people usually have a list of needs and wants
that they inquire about as their eyes busily inventory your
possessions.
Many of these eager-to-be best friends arrive out
of nowhere at odd times of the day or night because they
just wore out their welcome in some other guy's cage.
Look for red marks that begin to swell, bruises, and
contusions. One of the things that give away their situation
is when they tell you their philosophy of doing time is
much like defending a bunker. "Cellies stick together!
That's what I say! I got your back, pal, no matter what!"
When the FNG vends a to you any variation of this
philosophy, you can expect him to have many enemies
looking for him. Do not be surprised when some other
inmate shows up at the bean hole and tries to con,,, connive you
into stabbing "The Rat," or into performing some other
violent service for promise of future payment. They don't
pay, and their target is only a dopie who didn't pay either.
Though most captives in America's prisons we some type
of scurrilous misanthrope, many are mere common,
ordinary persons who would at least feel a modicum of
sorrow, for stepping on your face as they used you as the
path to freedom. Captivity is like the first ring of hell, and
people would be insane if they were not desperate to leave
by any means possible. One of my best friends was just
such a person (see: www.jamesbauhaus.org/TMeulogy.htm)
Travis decided he would leave so he ripped off all the
dope dealers for as much as he could, for as long as he could, until
they all wanted to kill him. Then he politely saved them the trouble
and killed himself. In doing so, he performed multiple
services to many people. He bankrupted some of the
parasites who sell poisons in prison. He put two smuggler
guards temporarily out of business during their
investigation by internal affairs. He cost the state $1.3
million dollars in tax-profits it expected to reap over the 60
years it wanted to keep him alive. He saved taxpayers this
same $1.3 million. He forced the cops and law-crats to lose
their substantial. investment in convicting him. And, he
made room for some worse sociopath to take his place.
Some best friends come from deep cover. One of
them was always carrying a Bible and shouting about the
virtues of "Black Christ Jesus." After a few weeks of
hearing him bellowing his brand of gospel truth, I noticed a
strange lack in the usual cacophony of noise-some nonsense
that pervades every prison environment, especially the
ghetto, "private" (corporate) prisons. It turned out that
"preacher-man," as he insisted on being called, was
conspicuously missing. People who forsake the name that
their mother gave them often turnout to be only temporary
best friends. Whoever it was hiding behind the moniker
"preacher-man," he liked to be late to chow. He would
hang back, lurking in his cage until everyone left, then he
would pilfer through some target's possessions. Whatever
his sticky fingers chose, he would sell to his real pals. The
week before he left, a brown guy went berserk with rage,
shrieking about how he was going to kill whoever stole his
gold necklace. Later, the inmates set a trap by lurking back
in their own cages, out cracked doors to catch
anyone who was skulking during chow. Preacher-Man had
been caught at befriending, then stealing from, his "Best
friends" twice that I know of. He only targeted other races.
When caught, his victims were obliged somehow to go ask
his own race to discipline him. This was, ostensibly,
required to prevent the possibility of any race "war." The
stolen items were generally gone forever. His fellows
would declare him disciplined. He would be caught again.
He was lightly beaten, apparently, judging from the thuds
and yelps emanating from the dark cage. He stole again,
got caught, and escaped by telling the cops to move him;
else the Indians would kill him.
The cops actually rewarded him by moving him to
a less-scummy prison. He was still practicing his craft
there, years later, when I finally showed up. The cops do
not seem to realize the damage they do with their policy of
rewarding, and thus encouraging, scummy behavior ahead
of correct, moral behavior.
True best friends are more often found outside
captivity, at least in my case. The forced poverty of
American slow-death facilities, whether commercial or
patriotic, tends to make honesty and morality into
weaknesses to be exploited rather than virtues to cherish.
Even good people, when ground by forced unemployment,
will often break in the face of such crushing destitution. It
is as if the goal of criminalization, conviction, and
enslavement is to produce more, worse criminals.
American politicians we pumped-up fear of crime to
wedge themselves into higher office. The American media
sells an incessant diet of crime-fear to attract audiences to
its advertisers. Hollywood and television producers push a
never-ending river of pro-cop, anti-crime video sewage at
the citizenry, who appear to be simultaneously titillated by
police power and horrified by macabre ultra-violence.
Everybody benefits by this systematic demonization of the
poverty classes and their banishment to dungeons kept far
from outside observation. The masses are fascinated by
unlimited police power and horrible sadistic crime, but
somehow these morbid curiosities cease as soon as they we
performed by guard instead of cop, and against captive
instead of free-citizen.
It seems that the most common best friend of all is
television; particularly the cop-u-drama. If captives want
better friends, it seems to me that we should petition to
have our own, real-life crime shows made out of prison
cop-camera footage. My guess is that, soon as citizens we
real violence in prison, they will quickly lose their taste for
the phony, computer-generated, trick-photography violence
and sadism of television and instead become OUR best
friends.
Best Friends, Chapter Two
Best Friends are everywhere, and in places you
would never expect. When I escaped Oklahoma's slow-
death camps, I expected the whole of mankind was against
me, excluding my family, of course. But the cops had them -
surrounded, and they and their news-media propaganda -
artists were doing their best to demonize me to them, which
is one of the reasons why we used to have working privacy
laws-to keep the state from using our families and friends
against us. Now we only have anonymity and dis-
information as tools to try and keep vicious state actors out
of our affairs. (They've long ago made the merchant class
into de facto police.)
So, I could not endanger my family, and had to be
extremely wary of any merchants. When they can't see you,
they can't get curious and thus become suspicious. With
this in mind, I stayed in the bush, traveling cross-country,
for over three days, always heading just west of due south.
The first friend 7 met was a rancher who caught me
drinking out of a spigot near his barn. It was almost 4 a.m.,
and still pitch black. No one should have been up at that
time, but the pipe knocked when I shut it off. I was
standing them like an idiot, stretching and yawning when
his light suddenly blinded me. While looking wildly around
for the lowest, nearest spot on the fence of his corral,
preparing to make a mad dash back into the forest, he said,
"You don't want to be drinking that water." It had been
rusty, at first.)
"The iron was good for me", I replied. He
chuckled, then asked, "what are you doing out here this
night?" Thinking quickly, I told him I was hiking to
Arkansas. (I did have a makeshift "pack" full of snickers
and Jerky; more of a bandoleer, really and a plastic coke
bottle on a rope slung over my other shoulder.) He politely
quit shining his light in my face and began playing over my
pack and water jug. He was old and grizzled, tall and
sinewy, weathered and wrinkled, about 65 or 70, of
Northern European Ancestry. A dark brown Wiemeraner
came around the comer, took up a position at his right,
stiffened and growled at me. Shushing his dog first, he
asked, "Arkansas? Which way is that?" I saw his eyes
sparkling with amusement and a slight smile on his face.
Without hesitating, I pointed perpendicular to my true path,
due east, saying, "can't you smell the chickens and pigs?"
He chuckled a little louder this time, and replied,
"That's well water; full of arsenic. Good enough for stock
since they don't live long, but not good enough for us. Help
me throw this feed out, and we'll get you some good
water."
"Smitty" Schmidt had been filling 5-gallon buckets
of cottonseed cake when I'd unwittingly attracted his
attention. We carried the heavy things, two at a time, to a
trough where his cattle ate. With both hands full, I couldn't
swat the dog, who was determined to shove its nose up my
ass. Four days without a shower made me doubly
interesting to him. Also, he seemed to be clairvoyant about
the jerky drooping down by my hip. Though it was hidden
within a mesh bag and still in its individually wrapped
plastic, it riveted his attention. He followed me on each trip,
begging. Last trip, I fished one out and began gnawing the
plastic off for him. It was like the stuff was bulletproof.
Smitry winked, saying, "Leave the plastic on; he'll enjoy it
for longer."
Smitty and I worked together until dawn, when his
wife called out that breakfast was ready. They had plenty,
and insisted that I join them. Eggs, bacon, biscuits, gravy,
hash-browns, jelly, milk and butter (no coffee, thanks)
filled the table. Mildred was only slightly surprised to see
me, and only raised one eyebrow at my gear. He told her
only that I was "Jay", and that I'd been helping him for a
couple hours or so. While we ate, they asked the obvious
questions, and I sold them a story between deflecting their
questions with ones of my own. Homelessness and
unemployment were common during this time. Reagan was
trying to fix me Johnson-Nixon "stagflation," caused by our
attacks on Vietnam and Southeast Asia, not counting their
secret wars on Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Libya. I was just
another victim of The Elites, broke and migrating to where
the jobs were. It was easy to believe, and mostly true.
They seemed to accept most of it, and, when I tried
to leave, they insisted on helping me. Mildred made
sandwiches, Smitty dug out an old canteen with a strap in it
that was far too big and heavy to lug around. He offered me
money, advice and a ride to the highway. I accepted the
sandwiches and money, and left the canteen on a fencepost
at the farthest boundary of his estate. The food was good,
the money would come in handy later, and I didn't want to
explain why the canteen was useless to me.
A few days later, I was filthy, dirty and in central
Dallas. With no papers to stave off police curiosity-stops, I
was obliged to join the underground. This is the community
of transients who live short lives of desperation on the
fringes of society. Some are the mentally challenged who
were emptied out onto the street when the health industry
bought the right to do this from the politicians. Some are
addicts, most are alcoholics; the rest are any of the
thousands of flavors of criminal created by busybodies
outlawing everybody else's conduct.
The harder the life, the deeper the friendship. My
life was as hard as theirs, but, like many of them, I
managed to slowly work my way up and out. This took me
considerably longer than usual, mostly because I don't like
to take favors. I'll give them, but taking them is not for me:
I don't like the sense of obligation they give me. I can't rest
while it's unpaid. I didn't want a favor so bad that I
wouldn't stay in any homeless shelter or hardly ever eat at
free food places. I've slept under a car hood someone had
thrown away at the base of the dike at Lake Arlington. I've
left groceries at Fort Worth Food Banks and dumped work
clothes at the Salvation Army, years after their services
helped me move up to prosperity after prison.
Only one year later I had a new identity and a good
job delivering electrical services with a crew throughout Texas.
My employer had me driving a huge aluminum van ,
an aid named Pat, when an odd thing happened. We were
flying east, down Highway Twenty when I saw a stalled car
stuck in the median. A woman had tried to U-Turn, but the
tires had cut through the grass into the thick mud beneath.
She had the door open and could be seen weeping with
frustration, gunning the engine in an obviously futile
attempt to escape that damp trough.
I stopped. Pat and I confirmed that we had no way
to help her except to take her a mile or two back to the last
gas station we'd passed on our way out. This lady was
about thirty, and paranoid as well as distraught. Probably
because my big white van was unmarked, and we didn't
wear spiffy uniforms, she was leery of us. She wanted
many assurances before accepting my help. She seemed to
think, outrageously, that we were shady people, and wanted
to know how I planned to get such a heavy, loaded truck
across the trough where she had failed. Pat gave her his seat
and braced himself in the doorway to the back. "The trick
to crossing soft ground is momentum," I said, trying to ease
her mind with a lesson on how to properly break a traffic
law. (I knew that there were paved tum-a rounds for the
cops every mile, marked with colored reflectors, but this
lady was overwrought and would not calm down until we
were headed straight back To Mesquite -esquire instead of away
from it. "You've got to build up a little speed, first, then
slog on through the pit, like this!"
The van sank deep into the muck and wallowed
like a garbage scow. The swaying was so bad that I was
afraid to turn the wheels at all. Good thing we had six of
them. Soon as me front - left touched the shoulder, t
whipped us around in the pause in traffic I'd aimed for,
then hit the gas. That 454 cubic inch engine threw us up to
speed quickly as I grimaced at the double diagonal trenches
I'd tom in me median. Someone at me Highway
Department wasn't going to like taking a crew out to fix
that mess.
The girl, whose name was Sarah, stopped crying.
Pat was talking to her while I wondered where all the gas
stations with tow trucks had gone. He had a good way with
people, which is why I liked to work with him. He was my
public relations man. Two miles back toward Mesquite, we
found a shell station. As we were making sure she had
everything needed to get safely away again, I noticed that
the credit card she used had a familiar German name on it.
Out of the blue, I asked, "your grandparents are Santry and
Mildred?"
"Why, Yes, they are," she replied, "you know them?"
Incredibly, I did, only barely, for a few hours, but
some cosmic coincidence had allowed me to repay the
favor they'd done me that morning when I was so tired of
pushing through the bush to get a drink and a canteen filled
at their farmhouse.
As I said at the beginning, friends are everywhere, and in
places you would NEVER expect. Sometimes you don't
even have to look for them; They just show up.