Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Johnson stopped at a door marked clothing room and opened it. Inside the small room, floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with what can only be described as rags—blue and gray tattered pants and shirts. Johnson handed us each a net laundry bag. “Take off your civvies and put everything in the bag,” he said.

Johnson waited impatiently by the door as we stripped. Another guard stopped at the doorway. “Thought you went home.”

“Thought so, too,” Johnson said.

I wanted to ask Johnson if he meant for us to turn in our underwear, too, but he was busy. So I just stood there in my Jockeys and waited. I wasn’t in a big hurry. I saw myself in a detached way, standing nearly naked in a place where they kept men in cages. I thought I should feel something. Fear or nervousness, something. I felt numb.

“What happened?” said the guard.

“Fucking Willy had these guys standing around next to the goddamn front door.”

“We supposed to put our underwear in the bag, too?” John asked me.

“I dunno—”

“Yeah. Everything goes in the bag,” Johnson said.

“Standing by the door?” the guard said, smiling like he was going to pop.

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “That damn nig—” He paused and looked up and down the hallway. “That damn nigger is about spacey as they come,” Johnson said.

The guard laughed. He seemed to be looking at me, so I smiled back. I knew Willy was spacey, too. Willy didn’t allow me to keep my toothbrush when we checked in—I had it in my jacket pocket—but said they’d give me another one. That’s pretty spacey, isn’t it? A toothbrush is a toothbrush—isn’t it? The guard saw me smiling and glanced at Johnson and nodded at me. Johnson turned around and saw the three of us standing naked, holding three laundry bags of stinking clothes. He jerked his head to the shelves. “Grab yourselves a set of clothes. You get one shirt, one pair of pants, pair of socks.” We nodded.

“Somebody’d been up shit creek if these boys had’ve taken off,” Johnson said to the guard. “And you can just damn well bet I’d be the one without the paddle.”

“I know it,” the guard said. “Jenkins has a hair up his ass when it comes to you, Roy. What’d you ever do to that man?”

I couldn’t find any pants that weren’t tom to literal shreds, and I was getting pissed about it. This is America, isn’t it? “Look at this shit,” I said to John. “These are fucking rags.”

“They’re what you get, boy,” Johnson said, irritated. “Get that shit on and let’s get out of here.”

I pulled on the most intact pair of pants I could find and rooted around the shelves for a shirt.

“The fucker had to come down and catch me one night when I was looped at the Alibi,” Johnson said. “Ever since, he’s been giving me shit for it.”

The guard shook his head, grinning at Johnson’s wild ways.

I found a shirt which had two buttons and put it on. I was trying to find some socks. The guard checked the hallway and said, “Yeah. Jenkins can be a real ball-buster about drinking,” he said.

We were all three properly dressed prisoners now, standing there in tattered blue uniforms that had been worn by hundreds of men over the last ten years or so, standing in socks, holding our bags of civilian clothes, waiting for Johnson to tell us what to do next before we dropped from exhaustion. “You got that right. I’m thinking I’ll transfer to state—” Johnson stopped when he saw the guard looking at us. He turned around. “All right. Put your bags over on that shelf. Grab a blanket and let’s get out of here,” Johnson said, pointing to a stack of gray woolen blankets on the floor. I’d missed them; thought they were cleaning rags. We each stashed our gear on the shelf and grabbed an armload of ragged blanket and clutched it to our chests. “Do we get shoes?” John asked.

Johnson shook his head like that was the dumbest question he’d ever heard in his entire life. “Naw. We’re out. They’ll give you some when you get to your cell block.”

“Well, Roy,” said the guard, “got to get moving. I’m taking the better half out tonight. Her birthday.”

Johnson nodded. “Okay, Henry. See you tomorrow.”

We followed Roy Johnson down the hall to a big steel door where he waved to somebody through the wire-embedded glass windows. He was signaling a guard who stood in a boxlike pavilion in the middle of the hub that was the central intersection of this jail. From that pavilion, a guard could watch all six wings. The door opened. We walked into the hub. The door closed.

We followed Johnson down a hallway. Inmates began hooting at us as we walked by. We looked pretty silly, dressed in our rags, and they had a terrific time letting us know that. There is only one thing lower than a prisoner in jail, and that is a new prisoner in the same jail. I noticed that the prisoners were dressed in fairly neat clothes and even had shoes. So this junk they gave us was probably just part of some initiation process.

“Hey, assholes,” somebody yelled. “Welcome to Charleston!” Hoots of laughter.