Not so in the slammer. I recall a sergeant-at-arms of an outlaw motorcycle gang and I can tell you which one as we have the tatts of each known gang on a chart in reception, who walking in my close company to the Circle to get his yawns (you get your pills and your methadone swill from the clinic sister in the Circle, which is the donjon, began working life as a chapel, as it says itself in MCCMXXCIII, and has on its roof a disused belltower of the same vintage as the disused belltower on Marys Mount, as well as your DXXVIII pre-release dollars from Centrelink) roared across at the rockies’ yard ‘You love fuckin kids ya cunts but we fuckin love kids!’
He was always there or thereabouts, our Zoltan. Patched members of motorcycle gangs hold rockies (paedophiles) in particular odium while bikie defectors, being known to know too much, are the dogs most at risk. Bikies will always have an old lady and a few kids outside and whilst in boob will often send these kids to exclusive private schools. Imagine the horror on learning from watching Nine Network News that Knox and Trinity Grammar and St Ignatius harbour rock spiders and yes we have free-to-air TV if we’ve been good boys.
A lad in the MPU listens to ABC Jazz. Just listens to channel 201 while reading the Periodic Table. He writes some interesting poetry too and quite popular. Let’s see if I recall the one a friend of mine found by the G-block photocopier;
2-CD PCP alpha-methyltryptamine
LSZee DOC foxymethoxy mephedrone
3-mmc phenmetrazine
4-fluoromethamphetamine
Flephedrone methaqualone
Pemoline methiopropamine
That’s the first verse of several but you get the gist. The Eighth Century Rule of Ailbe was also written metrically. That was to assist the Old Irish monks in memorizing the Old Irish. Rhythm and rhyme are mnemonic devices.
Old bikies, and we’re not talking Leb yard Nike bikies, have cast-iron ethics. The Hells Angels were established by demobbed veterans from World War Two even as certain of their peers took the strait gate and entered religious orders. All were used to uniformed hardship and rigid military discipline. A Russian sniper who later became an Orthodox archimandrite saw off more German soldiers during the battle for Stalingrad than were killed by the entire French army during the whole of World War Two. Such men were accustomed to pulling together against a common foe. When Comancheros who survived the Milperra Massacre did boob at Long Bay MRC, Jock, Chewy and Sunshine had them all painting Twelve-wing. That’s dead-set painting Twelve-wing not just sweeping Twelve-wing. Goulburn is presently the Rebels’ gaol; Bandidos go to Parklea. We can’t have certain inmates in the same gaol.
The present Anglican chaplain is assistant priest in the Cathedral. Chapel today is in G-block, education block. When I was a baggy we didn’t have a chapel and rainmakers had to meet up with their clients in the cells, while services were held in the wings, directly over the main offices, in little rooms that aren’t used anymore for security reasons.
One of them has a carpet-covered trapdoor in the floor and how the gigs love to see it, happen the carpet be folded back.
‘Gigs’ are outsiders visiting a gaol purely for perving purposes, while as to these clients, keep an open mind: Samoans use a condom machine as a hair gel dispenser while I know a man who took a leak behind a tree at a picnic and, spotted by a stone butch, found himself in court defending a charge of indecent exposure. He’s now on the sex offenders’ register.
Toilets! Let’s talk toilets, let’s have some dirty toilet talk. One to each slot, a few to each yard, irrefrangible stainless steel since the Abo emeute of ten years back destroyed D-wing, the two-story D-wing in which inmates are now mostly on remand, yet to face a court.
No toilet seats and no toilet lids to the toilets, naked toilets. Stark in the slots, which are less a double en suite with twin singles than a big dunny, a big dunny with two beds because the toilet is the gazingstock. It glistens. It can be seen from the door. Yes, there is a steel hand basin as well, but the toilet is the gazingstock. No screen to provide privacy so you void your bowel in full view of the gronk and whoever is peeking through the judas hole and the gronk will void his bowel in full earshot of you, a look-at-me, listen-to-me loo, the design world’s 2015 gig-inspired fancy anticipated. In the yards the handful of cans in each latrine is the only yard feature though each yard has a few benches and tables, ultra-sturdy. There is a screen but it’s only a screen of a sort, a half-mask if you like. You can still see the cans because if you’re a screw, you need to see what’s going on around the cans.
So when you’re inside you live in a dunny, you eat in a dunny, you sleep in a dunny and you share your dunny, for the most part, with a stranger who also lives in the dunny. That’s to remind you that you’re a piece of shit and what’s more, a bigger piece of shit than most. When Pico della Mirandola coined the phrase ‘the dignity of man’ in the fifteenth century, he must have forgotten that he had an arsehole and he hadn’t completed his gender studies course. There is no dignity in being a creature that shits, Pico, end of story. Man was not made in God’s image because God does not have an arsehole. God has only a cakehole. God has dignity because He is a spirit as Christ tells us, and spirits don’t shit.
Toilet paper! Where would we be without toilet paper in Corrections? Just the thing to hurl into the yard to valorise your grievances but there is another use to which a two-ply toilet roll may be put, and I don’t mean wiping an arse, though sagacious care of the arsehole is to be recommended in a setting where your arsehole is your most valuable negotiable security. Hanging out for a whack of hammer? Know how you can score a cap without having to pay cash? Just let someone fuck you without using a condom. Blasting ice but can’t find a vein? Douche with the tipless barrel (think safety, use lube). Scored a whack on your contact though you’re wearing overalls with ‘visits’ printed on them, zips secured with cable ties, don’t want to lose it on the strip search? You will be asked to squat and spread but well you know where you can safely hide a cut-down thirty-mill fit.
God the Father is shown with a bum
In the Sistine Chapel in Rome
Because he was made in the image of man
It stands to reason he would have a bum
But Michelangelo must have been first
To sneak behind him and glimpse it
Why on earth would God have a bum?
Purely in order to sit on his throne
There being no toilets in Heaven
But are there toilets in Hell perhaps?
There are and no toilet brushes
A loo for each two cellar dwellers at least
Mind you Satan (whom Allah accurse!)
Has hooves and horns as we know
Which means he’s vegetarian
So the smell’s not too bad there below
Collect for purity
We all have a tale to tell if we can be arsed to tell it. We all have a tale we mustn’t tell, we all have a tale we need to tell. The tale we mustn’t tell, we mustn’t tell lest it wound or traduce others who all have their own reminiscences. The tale we need to tell is the tale we mustn’t tell.
If we have none to whom to speak, we will tell the tale to ourselves. To whom do we speak when we speak to ourselves? The one who speaks is not the one who listens.
May the one who listens be the one to whom all hearts are open, from whom no secrets are hidden and to whom all desires are known.
A man who is pure in soul and without sin in his mode of life always speaks the words of the Spirit with chastity and he judges both the Divine and what is in himself in accordance with the measure