BILLY AND THE BUMP-MONKEYS

The prison "kops" needed a cage to put two Negroes in. The guy I had been forced to live with had left. The same had occurred to a Mexican who wanted to hide behind the moniker of "Billy". The kop told us to figure out which of us would move in with the other. I decided,

out of politeness and efficiency, that since I had less property to move, I would sacrifice my lower rack and move into the upper rack of Billy's cage. Billy had much, much stuff crammed in his tiny cage. I crammed mine in the cracks between his and hoped that this extra suffering would not last very long. Both of us were in a "jail" within prison. Prison kops like to make everything into a rat's maze, forcing their victims to try and find their way toward the upper rings of Hell, away from ever worse harassment, torture and sometimes maiming and death. This particular extra-punishment cage-stack was at Hominy prison Oklahoma, consisting of six miniprisons each of 160 victims, total, divided into two 80-victim "units" which are further divided into two 40victim "sides" of two floors of 20 victims each in ten cages. This architecture is used due to the ease of construction of extra walls, fences and doorblocks that are required as conditions deteriorate to the inevitable riot when captives finally go berserk with the constant grind of worse and worse petty, senseless harassment, theft of rights, degradation, lower food quality, cost cutting price gouging, etc. (Hominy prison is so shitty this way that mere months after it was built, it was destroyed by its victims, costing millions to repair. (See my site for details.)

Billy was no one to me, as are most captives. They work at making friends to mooch off of, while I work at keeping them from wasting my time and depleting my resources as I FIGHT FOR ALL OF OUR RIGHTS. I had met Billy my first day at that prison. He politely informed me that the table that I had set my tray on was the Mexican table, reserved for him and his "Homies.".

He had LOTS of "friends". There was a constant stream of prisoners in and out of our cage during every minute that the kops let the doors stay unlocked. At first, I thought that they were just the usual bunch of coffee-and-cigarette groupies that every prisoner with a bag or sack or pack attracts. From their attempts at secrecy, and Billy's offers of marijuana, it quickly became clear that the excessive traffic was caused by Billy's being what the cops and media like to call a "dope kingpin" or a drug "Lord". Regardless of what the cop cabals or the law lords and news-stalkers say, Billy was just another dope addict, but one with important differences: he, unlike his amigoes, had the wherewithal to make a profit off his addiction while in prison.

The kops finally locked up everyone and, at ten PM, I was getting ready for the usual fight to keep enough light on to work by when Billy uncovered a radio from nowhere. The good thing about prison jails is that the kops steal everyone's radio and TV. This allows people with goals to make progress. Light and quiet is like taser and teargas to young punks in prison. Thankfully, Billy was in his late 30s. He had a blue filter that muted the light to only about five footcandles (desktop in offices 40 to 80; dark parking lots are five footcandles). And he never blasted the radio, though he always had to have the crap mindlessly blowing Black rap all night, even while he slept. In both cases, he was afraid of the kops seeing in or hearing the "music". Like jealous mooches, the kops were always searching for anything that they could steal, however small and petty. The kops would leave us alone for two hours.

It was time to get to know me, and one of the first things he discovered about me is that I didn't want to smoke any of his dope. I had to explain to him how I only had one set of lungs, and that they had been wrecked by inhaling five years worth of lint in the McAlester prison garment factory. He did not believe a word of this, and told me that marijuana was good at unclogging lungs. He also automatically thought I feared having to pay half or owe him for it. Weed smokers dislike having to practice their vice solo: what use is it to get happy and try to joke with someone who is not so easily amused? Much more enjoyable is for two or more persons to get happy and waste the night talking nonsense and accomplishing nothing but social "bonding".

I had much better things to do, but would make an enemy if I did not feign some interest. Also, when minorities get to live with Caucasians, they view it as an opportunity. We are like celebrities to them. They, especially Negroes, want what we have, Intelligent minorities want to uncover the reason why we are so successful. They want to study our culture and habits, then grade their culture against ours. Lastly, they want us to validate them. They want us to be impressed by their abilities. They want us to praise them for overcoming adversity, for being inventive and for making the best of what they have. They want to convince us of their success. They do not want to hear a word of critique or take any advice. The quickest way to get dragged into a brainless argument that never ends is to try to offer critique or advice, or even try to correct their misconceptions. The biggest tragedy of minorities is that the most economical way to deal with them is to simply nod and simle, and let them blow their toes off.

Billy was one of the most mature and polite minorities I had ever met. If he had not been an addict (or, more properly, a mere dope-seeker), he would have been much like Gilbert, the crew leader I had worked with in New Mexico while a refugee from the government criminals of Oklahoma. But he was not going to modify his behavior. Every night, it wan the same routine: check for kops, turn on the radio, but low enough to hear the kops enter the building.

Smoke a toothpick sized joint. Talk to Whitey. It should have been illegal to leave eighty incompetent, inpulsive, often explosive and sometimes violent inmates stuck in tiny cages for hours at a time with zero supervision, not even a call button, but the criminals who run Oklahoma's prisons have never been punished for letting their victims die horrible deaths in their cages from heart attacks, appendicitis, heat prostration, heat stroke, suicide, medical neglect or murder. Whenever the ken did leave his nearly soundproof habitat in one building, walked 30 yards and entered the other building, there was a characteristic sound of air rushing into the building. If this occurred while Billy was wasting ten minutes to smoke his half-a-lung's worth of marijuana, he would leap up, stub it out, snatch up a can of perfumed talc and frantically spray huge, lung-killing gouts of this powdered rock into the air. Then he would flap a towel around like a maniac between fits of peering hard out the peephole, trying to locate the kop. Even if the kop did not threaten to look in the gawking slit, Billy would always pollute the air this way soon as he was finished polluting his brain.

Soon as he was finished smoking, he would get talkative. This is why psychiatrists wish they could make their patients use inhibition-dampening drugs; they make people talk. Inmates are orally oriented anyway, especially minorities, never having cared much about the hated

White man's book learning. You ever notice how a big, snot-nosed bird dog will shove its muzzle under your hand, practically forcing you to pet it? This is how these young inmates are, if you can imagine a house full of dogs demanding to be petted. Years ago, some would even follow me into the restroom, so eager were they to tell me their life stories. Conrad Lorenz noticed this human behavior and wrote of it in "The Compulsion to Confess".

Billy was the same, though usually they grow out of it by his age. The first thing he wanted me to know was that, despite prison, his way of life had not really changed that much. During my few months stay at his cage, he would vend this ridiculous notion to me several times. (One of the worst things about being forced to suffer prison, other than the daily torture and harassment from inmate and guard alike, is how quickly these people run out of life experiences they wish to tell and begin to repeat themselves, or simply relate as theirs events they have read, imagined or gotten from listening to someone else.) "I smoke dope every night," he would tell me. "I have this radio that I am not supposed to have. I had a TV not long ago. I'm getting another TV next week. I have all my friends. Prison really hasn't changed my life all that much.--" To refute this would only invite a nonsensical defense and endless argument. Instead, I simply imagine that it is a problem with definition. The smaller, more limited the mind, the smaller and more limited one's concept of what can be done with freedom and one's resources. Sometimes freedom is nothing much more than the ability to smoke dope with friends and laugh uproariously at cartoons.

By the second night together, he had asked around about me. The consensus about me is that I read a lot, use big words and must be very smart. Also, I've been in prison longer than ten or twelve of your average inmates, which they deduce by noticing that the number that the kops put on me is an order of magnitude shorter than their own numbers. Whatever the gossips said, it was good enough for Billy. He was ready to "deal", which means "exploit". He began by assuming that I knew about him. I didn't. He was surprised that I didn't, but was happy for an opportunity to explain. Most of these people whose lives extend not much farther than the dope they do are what I call dope braggarts. In prison, you trip over them every day. If you're only in a cage with some buffoon who does dope, which is 98% of all of them, any time a second one walks in to get high, he's got his tongue cocked to shoot all about his dope experiences. They all say the same things: "When I was out on the streets, I had the absolute BEST dope: My dope was so bleeping good, you could NOT smoke a whole joint: Sixteen of us smoked off of one pin-joint and got so blasted that we had to stub it out halfway through and wait to come down. Me and Dizzy, we supplied all the dope to that whole town: We got rich and lived like kings: We blew it all on cars, chicks and partying: Can I get one of those cigarettes from you? I don't even have a match, either, so could you light it for me too? But I just want to make sure you know, I sold the best dope in the world, I've been much higher than you've ever been, and I've made more money than you've ever seen:"

Billy was a little more subtle than this. He could afford to let actions do his talking for him. He had an Indian guy who came by every morning to pick up his two little six-pack ice chests, toss the water out and repack them with ice. After breakfast, Billy had two guys competing to sneak him milk out of the dining hall to put in these ice boxes. Billy had a guy who came by every other day who moved all the crap on the floor (EVERYTHING is on the floor in Okie prison, because the kops outlaw shelves) outside so he can sweep, mop, wax and buff. Then he puts it all back. Next, the clothes-man comes. He takes Billy's stuff to the laundry, gives it to the laundry inmate behind the glass, and picks it up when it is done, then folds it and puts it away, just right, in Billy's footlocker. The behind-the-glass laundry inmate supposedly washes and dries Billy's clothes in two special loads, with no other inmate's clothes. All the inmates working in the laundry promise this service, but not even Billy had any chance of it actually occurring with any regularity. Logistics and the kops simply would not permit it. (In McAlester prison, I watched inmates "rinse" other people's clothes by flushing them down the crapper--this is a common occurrence.)

On top of these service people, there was a steady stream of people coming by to sell, drop off, or ask for desired specifications of, artwork, crafts or other types of prison made trinkets, gew-gaws, gimcracks or knick-knacks. In addition to these people, there was a steady line of people wanting to trade their possessions for dope, or other people's possessions for dope. About ten percent of them want to try and get dope for "sex". (One guy I knew would finally get so driven to fix his nicotine habit that he would rush out, stay gone for about fifteen minutes, then come back with a brand new pack of marlboro red and begin madly brushing his teeth.) All these service personnel were dope-monkeys, crowding around the dope fountain, tripping over each other to get a few crumbs. The worst ones were the needle freaks.

Billy was able to control them so well that his inner circle of only four Mexicans and two Indians were able to collect a minimum of $2,000/month in profits. Billy's own bragging number was much higher, but lacked substance. He didn't even know the difference between profits and revenue, though he did have a concept of overhead. His concept of cryptography was laughable. To communicate between the six miniprisons and various "jails" within the prison, he and his "Vatos" used a simple substitution code dressed up to look like three tic tac toe grids. I told him that this was no different from the cryptoquotes in the newspaper. Any kop who intercepted these notes could decipher them easily using nothing more than his knowledge of letter frequency and trial and error. He said I was mistaken. He did not want me to demonstrate. ( In McAlester prison, the Indians used a shadow-writing that was harder for me to discern.) He continued to use the same code until the kops snatched him up and sent him to McAlester, Oklahoma's shittiest prison, where he is discovering, though not admitting, that okie guards can he just as shitty as California guards. His racial pride would not let him accept the fact that a Caucasian had uncovered a monumental hole in his privacy system while he was trying to impress me with it Instead, he went on with his plan.

He had found me to be trustworthy. He had found that I was no dope monkey. I was the perfect someone to hold his dope for him while inside the convenience of his cage. (For safety reasons, he kept no dope in the cage except the one or two toothpick joints he smoked each night. One of his largest overhead costs was requiring, for his own safety, others to hold his dope while he arranged for its sale or use. For years it has been very dangerous to possess any type of dope in prison. Dope laws are a big business for prosecutors. They and the prison administrators, et al, got politicians to make prison dope possession into a huge, horrible crime that they can profit from. Prosecutors got glory out of wasting taxpayer money prosecuting this crime. (Inmates are punished twice for this, once by the prison "courts" and the real courts, which is illegal due to double jeopardy) Prosecutors and judges got to enmensely expand their legislative budget allocations by exaggerating the importance of this crime. Guards are given incentives, such as bonuses, pay hikes and promotions, to find or frame captives for dope. Often inmates are given token reward for snitching off dopers to the prison kops. Dope laws are like dope to authority figures who are climbing the kop/ govcrat/political ladder. Now that there are virtually no escapes from real prisons, chasing dope is the only way left for the ambitious kops to worm their ways up- Kops are so numerous now that their competition against each other is quite vicious, though most captives have not realized this, and fewer still learned how to use it to lessen their oppression. Inmates are too busy being friendly with kops, trying to corrupt them, to notice much about what kops do to each other, who inhabits which cliques or their specific motivations.

With all the kops focusing on sniffing out dope, the inmate dopies were forced to hide their larger stashes deep inside their intestines- Billy viewed me as a potential opportunity to empty his colon into mine. He usually paid others in crumbs of dope to do this for him. He wanted me and everyone else to believe that he never carried his dope in his guts, but this is the curse of the copies who have short sentences and dope connections along with their addictions- Short-timers like Billy could not afford an extra twenty years for dope possession. Neither did they wish to incur the overhead costs of paying to have their dope stored in someone else's guts or the inevitable pilfering that results. (Also, there is the cost of the violence when/if the thief is caught. Usually the thief escapes after accruing maximum debt, by simply vending to the kops a tale of impending violence by a "gang".) Foremost in their minds is moving their stashes closer, but not too close, for safety, convenience and thrift. He was very disappointed upon finding that I would not even consider it. He offered me $100/week to rent my rectum for storage purposes before finally realizing that there was no possibility of this ever occurring. As sour grapes, he groused, "You're not fat enough anyway. Holders need to crap every day, or it's too hard to dig back out when it's needed."

All of Billy's dope came through the visiting room. About once a year a guard would get caught, mostly through the snitching of disgruntled inmates. Instead of being convicted of crimes, as would inmates caught at the same mischief, these guards would simply disappear from their jobs. Billy had a minimum of eight mules at any one time who would carry his dope out of the visit room. The stuff would be brought in by family members, and consist of soft balloons approximately two inches in diameter. Under tables would be secreted by the inmate cleaning crew large blobs of vaseline. This was essential for inmates to get these dope-wads up their asses. At Hominy prison, security was so lax that certain kissass inmates who regularly got visits every week could simply connive their way into the visiting room in anticipation of a visit. Everyone else had to be called to visit by the visit-kop upon arrival of their visitors.Inmates would compete with each other to stuff these balloons up their asses. They would brag that they could get more inside themselves than their rivals. A record was set by a gay friend of mine of eight ounces. No one had a scale, so accuracy could not be checked, but by volume it appeared quite large and implausible. There were always more volunteers than dope balloons. Though the kops closely inspected every inmate asshole as it tried to leave, they almost never found dope by the tell-tale smears of vaseline left behind. Their asshole inspection routine was mainly for mere harassment purposes. Despite what I wrote in "Heros of Abu Ghraib", prison authority has not yet the stomach to force its kops to perform serious intestinal searches except in extreme instances where the victim refuses to cooperate. They almost always cooperate. Dope is simply not that important, and the captives are not that aware of how long another twenty years is. When they do, inmates will simply switch back to swallowing the stuff. Authority regularly teams with Hollywood and TV to try and dupe inmates into helping them, (E-g, by selling them the nonsense that dope packages should be wrapped in carbon paper) but victims spread the word after being victimized, same as rats learn to avoid poison. (Carbon fluoresces under X-rays, revealing dope, not hiding it. This crap was on CSI last month.) By far, the Hispanics are the most efficient and disciplined in importing dope into prisons. Indians are third, and Negroes are last. Asians are not numerous enough to have a noticeable effect. Another set of copies tried to get me to believe that they had a maintenance kop bringing in dope for them, but this was a mere loyalty test. (They had stuffed a glove with talc and pretended to let me discover it by "accident" in a tool pouch my crew carried. I let them think that they had fooled me-) I never paid too much attention to their antics, but one could not help noticing when forced to live so close together. Also, they get continuously more lax in their secretiveness as they notice that you simply don't care and do not gossip. This, on top of their obsession to convince you of their cleverness, allows me to make a rough estimate of the amount of dope flowing through their hands per month. Without wasting effort showing my statistics, analysis or sampling techniques, I reveal the following:

Of the 960 inside captives suffering this prison, almost every one of them smoked marijuana. Weed would run short by wednesday and be unobtainable by most captives by thursday. They would "pheen" for it until saturday. A two finger "lid" of weed would make 70 to 75 (chapstick) "caps", worth $5 each. These loosely filled caps would make five double-paper, toothpick size joints- These pin-joints went for $2 each. (Same as cigarettes when they were outlawed.) Each balloon was 30 to 35 caps. A minimum of 60 balloons made it past the kops every month. In weed alone, this represented a value range of only 10 to 20 thousand dollars/month, figured in caps, then joints. This is nothing compared to prison canteen revenue.

Caucasian "gangs" generally have fewer dupes to bring them dope, but make up for this lack through their greater affluence. They bought dope wholesale from the Mexicans, who had the most reliable connections. Billy was the most successful of these wholesalers who revealed themselves to me. (There aren't that many) He had a love/hate relationship with these Nazi-pretenders. HE LOVED THEIR EASY MONEY and that they supplied their own mules, but he hated their competition and "prestige" The Negroes and Indians smuggled in negligible amounts of dope, but the Nazioids would occasionally suck up most of the prison money and credit by importing opiates and/or "speed", making it temporarily hard to sell weed, the general favorite of all. They would often pay the Mexicans to bring it to the visiting room from outside- Billy tried to sell me some of it , before he uncovered my lack of interest in getting high, even for free. The second or third night in his cage, his eyes lit up. He told me with great enthusiasm, "I've got some Nazi speed!" He seemed to think that, since I'm German, this was a selling point. What the inmates call Nazi speed is a trash concocted of anhydrous ammonia, cold pills, coleman lantern fluid and other chemicals that are poisoned with lithium from batteries. Each "cook" and abuser thinks that more lithium equals better speed. The fact is that the excess of lithium alone overexcites the neurons, making these ID-iots think that they are speeding. This lithium poisoning is what makes them act like crackheads, crawling around in circles on the floor. It locks up their thought processes.

They spend minutes trying to figure out and plan actions that normally take only seconds. Billy even offered to Simply give me some so he could get my opinion on it. Since I've never actually done any Nazi speed, he distrusted what I knew from books and from observing abusers. His view was that I could only know by doing I had no interest in deliberately poisoning myself with any type of trash speed, but I blundered into them abusing it often enough.

They are a very friendly ethnic group, thinking nothing of cramning 6-B people in a tiny, dark, two-man cage, tripping over each other while yapping, cooking, eating, smoking, drinking, shooting drugs or watching TV. Whenever they were up to anything that was outlawed,

they would do it in a very stupid way, despite their trying to do it with cleverness- They would start out smart, but when the dope got spread out on the table at the back of the cage, it would draw their look-out away from his job of looking out the gawkhole at the front of the cage- He was afraid of being cheated out of his turn, so he spent more time watching the dope than watching for the kops

Their incompetence at looking out leads to major problems for them. They would hide in the dark so that the kop could not see them piled in there- I couldn't see than crammed in their either, and angered them by walking in and whizzing while I assumed that they were merely socializing. It turned out that they were eating. Their cultural paranoia of always seeing sleights from "superior" Caucasians caused them to immediately conclude that I had deliberately "disrespected" them.

Another time, their lookout was not at his post when I came in expecting an empty cage. Instead, six of them were clustered at the back of the cage trying to get needles in their arms- They were like raccoons startled by the truck that was about to run them over. They erupted into a string of Hispanic curses directed, at first, at their nincompoop lookout, then at me for embarrassing them by catching them in the middle of their vice. By the way they complained, you would think that their incompetence was my fault and that I had accidentally caught them fellating each other.

I'd be embarassed too, if my life was focussed on shallow, hedonistic nonsense to the point of begging, "Aw, come on, Billy! Just give me a little bump! Just a taste! My grannie's going to send me some money. It should be here Monday. I swear to God, I'll pay you! Just a little bump!" This is what some trash speed, or a shot of cocaine, or opioid pills or whiff of crack will reduce them to. With mere weed, their biggest complaint is on the order of, "Who niggerlipped this joint?! (This is where the sucking-end of the joint is an inch of paper that will not draw because it is sodden with the spit of 12 nasty mouths.) Needle freaks are the worst. They'll sell their mothers to magog for just one more bump. I was trapped in a cage once when two of these losers ran in. They slammed the door locked in the face of a third, boiled down one "heroin" pill, shot half of it in each of their veins using a scrapedsharp basketball needle taped to an eyedropper, all the while bitching at each other and enduring man #3 pounding on the door, begging, "Let me in, deweds!" All this nonsense took a solid ten minutes, and when they finally let irate door-pounder in, he was happy to be awarded the trash, which he re-cooked and shot, using the same "needle"! He even pretended that he got high off of it, or he psychologically believed he got high. (Or he pretended to have felt a buzz as a face-saving measure.)

The last thing that Billy tried to impress me with was interesting. His "Callie" connection had gotten some "ice" type "speed" from Mexico. He let me look at it and tried to sell me some. It was actual, fine, clear crystals, as if it was synthesized with pure chemicals, and crystalized off the catalyst. (Trash speed is a white paste, or worse. The seller tries to convince you that he sees crystals in it and that you are blind if you don't see them too. Rarely, crunched-up sugar, salt or other crystals are sparingly added; dopies are very creative in making their dopes seem more valuable than they really are. Billy said that he and people like him often "beef up" the volume of the crack cocaine that they sell by processing it with mountain dew or 7-up instead of water. He said that this left tiny bubbles in the stuff when it cooled. This is like the Negroes inventing "wack" by smoking formalin, only 7-up crack is not deadly poisonous. This is why dope should be illegal and persons should be educated against it: same as businessmen in the late 1800s, these new businesspersons couldn't care less what mayhem they caused through use of profit-expanding adulterants.) Billy sold out of this pure stuff almost immediately, charging $100/"gram". (They just put two match head volumes in the corner of a baggie and pronounce it a gram. It was more like a third or a fourth of a real gram.) Like they did weed, they smoked this "ice" in about the stupidest way possible. They made a toilet paper wick to barbeque a light bulb holding a very small quantity of ice, while sucking out the smoke through a pen barrel. Three of them spent thirty minutes trading hits off a "gram" this way. After each hit, they would remind the toker, like parrots, repeating "pretty baby!"; "Don't hold it too long! The smoke will crystalize your lungs and kill you!" The smoldering toilet paper quickly filled the cage with acrid fumes. I had to leave. When they finally came out, all three of them were grimacing like chimpanzees spitting alum, and chewing on their lips, the inside of their mouths and on their fingers. This behavior put the lie to their sales pitch of this being the celebrated "Methamphetamine" ice. (Koreans shipped it here in the late 1980s.) Mexican ice, or at least this ice, was made from desoxyn, the cheapest, easiest-to-make amphetamine with the side effect of making users grimace and gnaw at themselves. It is only two chemical operations away from being nothing more than ephedrine. They were back down to ground level in five hours. Billy smoked some more, alone, during count and asked my opinion. I kind of liked the guy, and did not want to offend him with the truth. The truth would have sounded elitist of me to him anyway. I told him that I was suitably impressed, and managed to prevent myself from telling him that, 40 years ago, people got a much longer, better speed high for 40 cents per person. (Four white crosses at ten cents each would last 18 to 20 hours. Ten of these five milligram meth pills,shot, would give the needle freak a head rush and keep him speeding pleasurably for eight to ten hours. Plus, he would often be accomplishing useful work instead of acting brain damaged and retarded, as crack heads and abusers do today.) Fact is, the govt's "war" on outlawed, non-corporate "drugs" is working in the worst possible way: by preventing pure, clean drugs and causing use of dirty, deadly drugs.

One thing that Billy liked to tell me while he was high was of how silly and incompetent kops were in Oklahoma compared to California kops. He apparently thought of himself as a connoisseur of US prisons. He thought of Oklahoma prisons as like boys' homes that his Vatos and Sylvanias had no trouble at all circumventing. The worst thing that the Okie kops did to him was lock everyone in their cages after a stabbing. This interrupted, temporarily, the sales of dope and other activities. He liked to say how easy it would be to escape from Hominy prison, suggesting that one day, a group of Mexicans may decide to simply crash out the front door, en masse. To me, this sounded ridiculous as the last "escape" from Hominy, when a Mexican kitchen worker, no doubt relying heavily upon more wisdom gleaned from TV, sneaked into the garbage truck via the dumpster. He made it all the way to the dump, where he stayed until they dug him out and buried his crushed corpse elsewhere.

Their successful big plans were in laying down, doing their time, and preventing others from negotiating better, more humane conditions. Primarily, their big plans were of having the best time possible while waiting for their captors to open their cage and let them out on parole a few days prior to discharge. Specifically, his friends were always asking me to trade places with them so that they could have a sleepover with their dope-daddie. I never acceded to this nonsense, no matter how loud and fancy their tantrum. A broken-toothed, scuff-headed youngster was particularly insistent. Billy bragged that they were going to stay up all night "distilling" beer into moonshine. As they had no copper coil, I advised Billy of the chemical impossibility of accomplishing this. Despite the fact that, without a copper coil, they could obtain only the sameazeotropic mixture of alcohol and water that they started with, no matter how much they boiled it, Billy insisted that they could make pure alcohol, and had even done this before many times. Contradicting the parts of reality that he could not perceive was a common action for Billy.

His grandmother saved his life at least once. He would brag that cops refused to patrol California neighborhoods taken over by Mexicans. As a consequence, he and his extended family and friends had gotten drunk and high and began playing with an old, torn-up shotgun. Everything on it was broken, but they could force it to fire by slamming the breech into the sidewalk or street. Then they would stagger around, laughing hysterically until another drunk would manage to load it and slam it down onto the concrete again. They did this until one of them got sprayed and had to go wash off the blood. Then grandmother stormed out and took away their dangerous toy.

This is how they are. They live short, ignorant, intense lives of little accomplishment, like children running away from school. They use their advantage of drug connections, then waste it on nothing more profound than having a good time. Billy was the most mature of any of them that I"VE YET in prison. They all think that the whole southwest belongs to them, and they are succeeding in taking it all back without a war, only immigrating, with the willing help of our short-sighted, labor-sabotaging, quick-sell-out politicians, whose secret plan is to harness these Mexicans to pay for the retirement of their previous tax herd. Billy would say of them, "The richer your are, the dirtier your hands." He should know: one of his tribe's adaptations to their prison life of selling dope and attacking people who don't pay up was to always be last to lock themselves in their cages when the kops ordered the doors shut for count. This way, if any one of their number was attacked in retaliation, all he need do is scream to make all the others come running.

Indeed, the richer you are, the dirtier your hand and the more you need protection, be it from retaliating prisoner dope addicts or the "TERRORIST" victims of politicians' various wars, sneak attacks, torture, abductions and mass murders. The absolute worst criminals are not the poor varlots in prisons; they are the ones who control the vast resources of govts to perform megacrimes and dodge accountability. By comparison, persons who merely kill, maim or rob one victim at a time are inconsequential and pathetic.