We were in A North wing, where the lights never went out. A North was suicide watch and though very few of us had actually tried to kill ourselves, we were all somehow a concern to the powers that be. I had never been to jail, and I was going to be locked up for a long time, so the county kept the high-watt rays of worried lights on me at all hours.
Along with the lights were the guards who walked past every seven minutes, like the steady sweep of a lighthouse beam. They would walk up to the bars, look in, and minus any scene of horror, they’d walk away without a word. Sometimes I’d ask about the weather, and sometimes they would answer, and it felt good to know that the outside was still there. But mostly the only way to get a guard’s attention was to die, or press the panic button marked EMERGENCY ONLY in red, stenciled paint above the phone.
A North had eight cells—half held four inmates and the other half held six. But the jail was always overcrowded, so there was usually an extra man or two in each. I had been the fifth man in Cell 7, so I’d taken a mat on the floor in the dark corner by the door. Cellmates came and went, and I could have rightfully taken one of the bunks on the west wall, but as the methadone ran out I found comfort in the dimness of my corner. I lay there and sweat and shook, and tried not to think too much, and memorized the Twenty-third Psalm and recited it minute by minute, hour by hour.
I had Bob Barker every weekday morning, though. There were the games, the new cars, the spinning wheel, the showcases. Sometimes tears would fill my eyes when a lucky member of the audience would high-five their way through the crowd to stand on the contestant’s row. They were so genuinely happy to be given a chance, and as they looked at Bob brightly lit onstage, it must have seemed like a better life was right there for the taking. Their hearts’ desires were a possibility—and not in some distant future, but right then, or at least for the next hour. But Bob Barker and a screaming studio audience can only go so far as company, so by the time Italian Tom walked into A North 7, I guess I was ready.
Tom had moved on from talking about the hit-and-run to acting it out, standing up in the cell and moving in slow motion, like a marionette with joints held together by pins. He explained that, in fact, most of his bones and joints were metal, and he was only able to move freely after he’d been up and moving for a few hours, longer if the temperature was cold. “I’m still a little stiff,” he said as he took off his shirt. It was January and only ten-thirty.
Tom’s torso was half green with tattoos. After just a couple of months in jail, I’d learned to recognize tattoos inked in prison—they’re green or gray and lack the sharp lines of a professional needle. Prison artists use whatever they have, usually a sharpened guitar string rigged to the motor of a cassette player. The ink is made of soot mixed with spit, sometimes urine, and the art, while brilliant and precise in concept, is dull and faded on the flesh. Tattooing in prison is like trying to sew fine stitches with a knitting needle. It’s the essence of prison ingenuity—that so much can be done with so little.
Tom’s chest looked like a page from an artist’s sketchpad—a couple old cars, a lion, Mickey Mouse, cell bars with tears spilling out, a green blob of something that may have been the Earth, or a ship, or a basketball, or the moon, and the full-body portrait of a woman Tom would later call Karen.
Karen was not a prison tattoo. She began over his heart and was clean and sharp with full, red lips. Her right eye closed in a wink, but the left iris was light green under long lashes. Her hair seemed blown by a wind up over Tom’s left shoulder and neck, ending in wispy strands on his collarbone. She was nude, of course, with large breasts and wide hips straddling his sternum. Tom had a hairy Italian chest but had kept it shaved smooth and clean, everywhere except for Karen’s pubic area, with its immaculately trimmed little triangle of hair.
The Price Is Right came and went but I could barely pay attention. I was watching the tattoo of Karen and wanting to touch her Italian olive skin. It felt awkward to stare at the chest of a man and fantasize about warmth and contact, but her light green eye and long, swirling hair seemed to speak to me, to have come down through the years since it was inked to grant me a moment’s peace and connection to the human race.
The cell door opened and we were back up to six men. In walked a middle-aged, light-skinned black man with a misshapen afro and a patchy beard. Even in a fresh orange Kalamazoo County Jail jumpsuit he reeked of alcohol. “Ain’t right. It ain’t right,” he said. “Mind my own business, cops come in and Taser my ass. That ain’t right.” He unbuttoned his jumpsuit halfway and rubbed at the two swollen marks from the Taser prongs, like a fresh snakebite. “And I’m hungry too, goddammit. That ain’t right.”
He was loud enough to wake Domino. The man paced the length of the cell, carrying on about the Taser sting until he saw Tom and his scar. “Damn, man!” he said. “What happened to you? You get shot or something?”
“I got hit by a Caddy doing sixty.”
“You look like Frankenstein, man. You should be dead.”
“I did die—twice,” said Tom, “but they shocked me back to life.” He knocked again on the metal plates in his forehead. “This is all steel.”
“Then you is Frankenstein!” the man said, and went back to pacing and complaining about his hunger and police brutality.
Tom’s face and shoulders sank, like whoever had been pulling his strings had just dropped them. He looked at the drunk for a second, then looked down, and it was amazing to see a man so big hurt by something so small. But in here you can’t just shoot down a man and his story, lie or not. What’s more, he’d called Tom a monster, and even Frankenstein has feelings.
“You know,” Tom said, “if you’re hungry you can get something to eat.”
“Yeah, how?”
“Go push that button up there on the wall and order a pizza.”
The man walked over to the corner of the cell. “It says ‘Emergency Only.’”
“If hunger’s not an emergency, man, I don’t know what is.”
“Yeah, okay!” said the drunk. “What you guys want on it? I’ll share.” He put his finger on the button. “Man, they don’t do shit like this in the Kent County.”
A woman’s voice came over the intercom: “What’s the problem?”
“I’m hungry,” the drunk said. “I want to order a pizza.”
“Hold on,” she said.
He looked back at us, giddy, like a would-be big shot handing out money not his own. “So you guys like pepperoni?”
All of us nodded in our own slight ways. Then the lock of the heavy steel door slid open and five guards stepped straight for him.
“Okay, smart-ass, we’ll get you your pizza,” said a bald guard with a mustache. The drunk was handcuffed and dragged out of the cell before he even had time to grasp what was happening. He looked puzzled as he left, as if he was still expecting them to ask what toppings he wanted.
Afternoons, during soap operas, we would mute the TV and read, write letters, do whatever it took to pass the four hours until dinner.
Tom made his bed, then sat at the picnic table to draw. I lay on my mat in the corner and watched the silent soap opera figures on the television screen. There was a ransom plot going on that week—a gorgeous blonde tied to a chair in a storage facility. Without ever hearing the words