Written by guest author Jeremy Miller

This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Jolene Rice’s story is the third of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.

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1

I watched an action movie with this guy once. Why? We were on a date. We hadn’t progressed past non-banal date activities like going to a movie. I don’t remember the name of the movie but it has a scene where Jason Statham is driving a crane down the highway going a hundred miles an hour and swinging the wrecking ball around smashing bad guys. That wasn’t the whole movie (probably) but it’s what I remember.

He was smashing the bad guy cars anyway. You didn’t see any of the actual bad guys get squished. We were left to infer their horrible deaths for ourselves. It’s called bloodless carnage in showbiz. It satisfies the violent baboon instincts in our brains without making us sad by seeing the true horror of violence. The audience wants to see the people that made Jason Statham mad get killed but they don’t like to see them crying and bleeding and shitting themselves as they die. This isn’t Saving Private Ryan for God’s sake. Realistic violence is just not good for a four-quadrant hit.

Anyway, the guy I was on a date with, who probably had a name (Gary? Terry? Spillane? Grunkis?) spent the whole time walking out of the movie theater and the whole time walking through the parking lot and the whole time driving away complaining about how unrealistic the crane scene was.

He was a crane operator. He knows how cranes work damn it and what Jason Statham was doing is not how cranes work. He couldn’t get over it. All he had to do was shut up about the damn crane and make a move and he was going to get laid. He just couldn’t. Guys are like that sometimes. Dog with a bone. They can’t let go.

Unrealistic movie scenes related to my job don’t bother me. I can enjoy James Bond or . . . wait, are there any other spy movie franchises? Kingsmen? Is the Kingsmen about spies? Oh, Mission Impossible! That’s another. Anyway, I can enjoy that stuff even though it is not a fair and accurate representation of reality.

Who would want to watch a realistic spy story? That would be boring.

2

The first idea was to send me? undercover as a lawyer. Once I was inside they’d have some other agents in place incite a prison riot. Then it was up to me to get access to the target during the chaos.

This is a prime example of the unrealistic nature of spy movies. M never comes up with a dumbass plan for Bond that has no chance of working.
People like to think that doctors and military personnel and politicians and people with jobs that affect their lives and wellbeing are of a higher quality than the co-workers they complain to their spouse about. Sure, Johnson from Analytics might be a moron but the guy flying my plane has his shit together.

Nope.

I get why people have an assumption of competence. It would be impossible to leave your house and do anything if you allowed yourself to think about how everything going on around you is in the hands of people as drunk and stupid and lazy as everyone else. You’d never get out of bed if you let yourself face that truth. Like a lot of human thought this delusion is a defense mechanism.
I pointed out that the first thing prison staff do in a riot is put the facility on lockdown. Which I felt would make it very difficult to get anywhere. The next plan they came up with was we should do a “reverse Shawshank”. Someone mentioned Papillon. One dingdong wanted to drop me into the exercise yard from a hot air balloon.

They say when you’re brainstorming there’s no such thing as a bad idea. This is incorrect. Lots of ideas are bad. Most of them maybe.
Eventually the plan we decided on was undercover as a prisoner. Was it the best idea? Probably. But we only arrived at it because we ran out of steam. It wasn’t decided on; it was just the last idea on the table when we got hungry.

3

My lawyer friend has told me a few times that women’s prisons aren’t so bad. Not only because women are vastly less likely to be violent psychopaths than men but also because society is much more willing to allow women’s prisons to be nicer.

Nobody wants men’s prisons to have amenities. At all. They don’t want male prisoners to be rehabilitated. They want them to be tortured. And not that sissy Abu Ghraib kind of torture, the good old-fashioned down home patriotic kind of torture from when this was a country of real men and not whiny little babies.

A man was convicted of a crime? Any crime? And you want to spend my hard-earned tax dollars giving him a toothbrush? He should be beaten and raped every day from now until Jesus comes to send him to Hell!

That’s what people want for the male prison population, but they’re willing to cut women a little slack. A man goes to prison that’s justice, people are happy. Fuck that guy. A woman goes to prison and people are sad. Something went wrong with society. The poor lady needs our help.

The women’s prison my friend went to when she was a public defender had an art studio. They offered a catalog of classes. They had substance abuse programs and therapists, and they raised chickens in a lovely big green outdoor space.

I think she went a little overboard in saying how nice it would be in a women’s prison. It probably depends on the prison. There must be some place where they send the women Charlize Theron plays in movies when she wants to win an Academy Award.

My feeling is that society isn’t entirely wrong. In this instance. According to a statistic I just made up half the women in prison are there because of some scheme her dirtbag boyfriend cooked up and then when the shit hit the fan he left her holding the bag.

If you ever want to see what true emotional devastation looks like (which I don’t know why you would) take a look at the footage of a woman in a police interrogation the exact moment when she realizes that her “boyfriend” is not going to confess to drug trafficking to save her. It’s almost like maybe he didn’t love her.

Say what you want about men, they know how to hit for distance.
Point being, it’s easy to see why there’s more sympathy for female inmates.

4

You may be thinking (you may even be assuming) that the prison staff were in on the plan. That meetings were set up. That middle-aged men gathered in conference rooms. Zoom calls were held. Calendar invites were sent out by assistants. People were on their phones in Beltway traffic. Arrangements were made.

It’s a reasonable thing to think. What might help you going forward is understanding that there’s nothing reasonable about my job.

One thing that is accurate about your James Bonds and similar movies is how small covert operations are. Bond is told that he’s supposed to go shoot a guy in the face who’s trying to poison the ionosphere or whatever the fuck and they give him a watch that emits a neutron laser and they tell him the name of a guy in Uzbekistan that might know something about it and off he goes all alone.
That’s not far off.

The point of secret shit is that it’s secret. The CIA wasn’t selling crack to inner city youths just because they were racists, they needed money to fund their illegal activities. Going to Congress to ask for funding for your operation is the opposite of secret. Well sort of, nobody pays much attention to Congressional sessions, but a few people do pay attention and they’d tell someone and then Jon Stewart would talk about it on a podcast and then it wouldn’t be a secret.
The prison staff weren’t in on anything, they didn’t know anything. I got into prison the usual way people do (well white people anyway). By committing a crime. Several crimes actually. It’s harder to get locked up than you’d think. Law enforcement isn’t on top of things the way I’d like them to be.

I’ll take the hit on the first one. The first one was my bad. I found a guy on the sex offender registry and forced him swallow razor blades until he died. That was my mistake. He died before he could call 911. And when someone finally went to the house to find his dead body and call the cops it was a week later.
But the bigger problem was that nobody cared he was dead. Not to mention it’s really hard to solve a murder that’s done at random. The homicide detectives had my image on his Ring cam and they had my fingerprints and DNA but even if they had really tried to solve the case what good would that have done unless they knew who I was and that I might be a suspect?

So what was an oopsie-doodle. Killing someone I had no connection to. I saw Strangers on a Train, I should know better. I should have dated the guy for a while before I murdered him, given the detectives some social media posts to work from.

Now the gas stations I put on the robbery squad. After the seventh time I robbed a gas station and was loitering in the area afterwards I started to wonder how the cops ever solve a robbery.

I hit paydirt when I went to a country club and bum rushed a rich guy. Which is what I should have done in the first place. You bust into the dining room at a fancy club to kick a rich old man in the dick shouting anti-capitalist propaganda and they’re going to get you.
I should have known that.

5

Did you know that you can’t plead guilty when you get arraigned? Even if you already confessed. The legal system is an odd beast.

An odd slow beast. Six months after I savagely beat an old man and slapped his mistress so hard she got partial paralysis in her face I actually got processed into prison. I don’t know why I got charged for the slap, most of her face was already paralyzed by Botox. Seems like a ‘no harm, no foul’ situation.

The prison staff wasn’t “in” on it but strings were pulled to get me into the right prison. They’ll be pulled again to get me paroled when the job is over. Assuming they don’t leave me to rot.

One nice surprise is that nobody tried to sexually assault me during my voyage through the various custodies I was in. I figured at the least one guard (they don’t like being called that BTW) would finger my butthole but there was none of that, not even a fondling.

Kudos prison system!

That having been said it’s pretty outrageous that male corrections officers are allowed in women’s facilities. I suppose they don’t have much choice. There probably aren’t a lot of women clamoring for those jobs.

After they hosed me down and deloused me and gave me my uniform it was still hours before they actually chucked me into genpop. I had to talk to a counselor and some other lady with the department of whatever and this and that. It’s like they were actually trying to help me with the difficult transition.
When they finally turned me loose (so to speak) they assigned me a prison buddy to show me around. She said she’s thirty-three but she looked sixty-three. Most jarring of all she looked like a mom. She had that mom shape. Seeing her in prison bothered me more than anything else. She was just so out of place.

“So what’d you do?” I asked her while she was telling me how to get an extra blanket if I get chilly.

“You never ask anyone that” she explained to me.

Fair enough.

6

My prison mom-buddy was showing me the chore wheel. She didn’t call it that but that’s what it is. Three days a week you make low quality mattresses for other prisons and you rotate through other jobs the other two days, cooking and laundry and stuff like that.

She stopped explaining to say to me “Are you . . . uh . . . you don’t seem . . . um . . . I’ve been doing this a long time and you’re very collected. Have you been inside before?”

“No, but I watched a couple episodes of Wentworth, I think I got the gist of it.”

She dead faced me. I guess humor isn’t big around here.

“I’ve been in worse places” I explained.

“Bad marriage?” she asked with soulful ‘I know about that honey’ mom-eyes.

“Nah, I haven’t found the right fellow yet.”

I saw her flinch when I said “fellow”. It’s not uncommon. A lot of people assume I’m a lesbian just because I’m tall and muscular and I was good at sports and I was in the military and I have short hair and I don’t wear make-up and because of the way I stand and walk and talk and act and live my entire life.

I guess their assumptions are fair now that I think about it.

“Isn’t this a violation of the thirteenth Amendment?” I asked, tapping on the forced labor rules she was explaining.

She froze like a possum in a floodlight “I . . . don’t know.”

“There must be some exception. Where’s the library? I should look it up.”

“Can I just finish the items on my checklist please?” she fretted.

“What difference does it make?”

“I’ll get in trouble if I don’t do everything on the list.”

I dropped her a wink “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“Someone will” she said, looking around like we were being watched.

“I thought snitches got shanked in the shower. Shivved. Is it shivved or shanked? What’s the difference between a shiv and shank? Or do you shank someone with a shiv? Hey, how do you keister a shiv without ripping your asshole apart like shredded pork? I saw that on Justified, is that a real thing? You know, you don’t even need to make a shiv to stab someone, if you practice you can do it with just your fingers. You might break them a couple of times at first but it’s possible.”

I could see that I was freaking her out so I stayed quiet after that and let her finish new hire orientation. The last thing she did was show me where the panic button is.

“Never use it” she said solemnly.

“Cool, just like Wentworth” I told her.

7

The conventional wisdom is that your first day in prison you should attack the biggest guy you can find with a lunch tray so everyone thinks you’re crazy and nobody will make you their bitch. But as a wise man once pointed out that plan can backfire because “some men like their bitches crazy”.

I had no intention of doing that, but I did end up in solitary on my second day.
I was looking around, getting the lay of the land and this girl confronted me. She rolls up on me and she told me that I shouldn’t be in her pod. The cells (rooms honestly) are arranged in pods so each pod can be sealed off individually. For fire prevention I suppose.

“No, it’s cool” I told her.

Okay. Here’s something about me. You can curse me, you can cuss me, you can say whatever you want, you can throw things at me, you can shoot at me, you can try to burn me alive, throw acid at me, stab me, whatever you want. I don’t get upset. That’s the job.

I don’t like being grabbed. You get grabbed a lot in prison. Guards put their hands on you all the time. I was grabbed more in those 30-whatever hours than I had been in my adult life. But that’s the guards. I wasn’t going to take that from her.

It’s a weakness of mine.

She grabbed my sleeve as I walked past her so she could sass me some more.
I should get a ton of credit because all I did was take her to the ground and push her face into the floor while I explained to her that grabbing me was nothing to take lightly. I could have hurt her a lot worse. A lot worse.
Her friend, who’s back-up I assume empowered her sassiness despite being a foot shorter than me, got her bottom lip ripped off.

I could have hurt her a lot worse too. A lot worse.

But that doesn’t matter. I still got sent to solitary.