In prison, we talk about film.
We fantasize about film.
We talk about prison movies as if the real prison doesn’t exist, as if there is only Clint Eastwood and Alcatraz, only Paul Newman and his chain gang. Because the real prison has no escape.
There never has been a prisoner to ever successfully escape here.
Ever.
There have been attempts, deaths, bullets, electrocution, falls, running, re-capture, more prison time added on.
The prisoners quote The Shawshank Redemption. They misquote Shawshank. They re-quote, make up their own quotes. They own Shawshank, reclaim it. A Scarface version.
“Get busy killing, or get busy dying.”
“Same old shit, different decade.”
One prisoner, this kid with a yellow dragon tattoo that wraps around his face (I’m not kidding), can do full Andy Dufresne monologues. He does them flawlessly. Although with horrible acting. He stands there, swaying, the pocket on his prison uniform ripped, his head all bald and fat, his fingers rubbing an invisible booger. But he knows every umm and uh. I’ve seen him do the monologue in the pisser, in the chow line, in the yard, in his cell.
There is a rat-a-tat-tat to the film conversations. Then quiet. This is prison where time goes on past the horizon, into infinity.
I go home and watch films. I have no cable. I have no heat. I have no bed, just a mattress on the floor, a DVD player, a large old TV. The prison pay is great, but I’m part-time, waiting for a full-time slot.
My girlfriend is French. I’ve visited France with her once. She showed me the prisons there. I made her. She wanted to show me the cathedrals. I wanted to see the prisons. She showed me an empty prison near Paris, abandoned, overrun now by a bidonville, a can town, a town made of cans, shacks, the entire prison redone in schizophrenic red and blue graffiti so that it looked like America exploded. She showed me an operating prison outside of Lille, an intricate spider web of mesh hanging high over the entirety of its buildings. She explained that a stolen helicopter swooped in and a prisoner was able to escape. I asked why the guards didn’t shoot the prisoner, why they didn’t shoot down the helicopter. She said that in France they would never do that. I told her in America they are eager to fire their guns, waiting, anticipating, excited. She said she knows, that she watches the news.
We watch The Evil Dead. We fall asleep to screams. I wake up in time for the ending. The film reminds me of prison, the incarceration of the cabin. I fall asleep to the end credits, the peaceful jazz, “The Charleston.” The music slows down and my body gets big and I’m swallowed by the blackness of dreams.
We have four seizures in one day. The prisoners keep having them. They’ve had multiple head injuries. Ex-football players, ex-boxers, current boxers, fistfight fanatics, guys who knock their heads against the wall when they’re angry, when they’re bored. When you enter the prison, the first thing you see is an indentation on the bulletproof glass. That was from a head. Heads are extremely vascular. I’ve seen so many prisoners who look like Carrie at the end of the Stephen King film. They walk up to you with their hands out, almost like they want their mommy, and the blood soaks every inch of them from the top of the tip of their skull’s coronal suture down to the nail of their biggest toe.
Add in alcohol and drug withdrawal, hyponatremia from prison food, hypertension from prison life, amphetamine overdose from having it snuck into their cells, the extreme heat and lack of air conditioning in summer, and a long list of more reasons and you end up with countless seizures. The fear comes on, or an aura, or déjà vu, or nothing, and suddenly they are ictal. The electrical seizure in the brain like the fence around the prison with a thousand escapees clinging to it.
I’ve had one once. During my childhood. I can still feel it, sense it. The memory stays with you forever. The doctor said I’d have more. She told me to get plenty of sleep each night, to avoid drugs and alcohol, and to stay as far away from stress as possible. The seizures never came. They are waiting in my body, somewhere, in my brain, for the right moment.
I’m treating a pedophile named Bob. Another prisoner is telling me Bob’s going to swallow his tongue. It’s impossible to swallow your tongue. That’s like worrying you might swallow your stomach. Manic, the prisoner is telling me to put my finger in pedophile Bob’s mouth and pull his tongue out to protect it. The prisoner has a swastika on his throat. I want him to swallow his swastika, to choke on it. I wait for Bob to stop seizing. It’s long. The swastika prisoner comes over, saying he wants to hold him down. I tell him that could dislocate his shoulder. I tell him to wait. We wait. The seizure isn’t ending. Seizures are about waiting. Post-ictal, there is a lot you can do. Now, you do your time. You wait. You hope.
The pedophile got caught with child porn. The pedophile killed ten children. The pedophile kissed his niece. The pedophile didn’t do anything, was framed. You never know. Prison sentences are like diagnoses. He could be tuberous sclerosis. Maybe it’s meningitis. Or encephalitis. Could be stroke. Cocaine. Ecstasy. Brain abscess, phenylketonuria. Could be an Iraq vet. Bad luck, bad genetics, bad blood vessels in the brain.
He could be in for possession of drug paraphernalia. Or kidnapping. Or possessing of child pornography (third degree). Or criminal possession of a pistol. Or hindering prosecution. Or innocent. I don’t know. I don’t judge.
I judge heart rate. I judge breathing. I judge pulse.
We transport him to the hospital. Or they do. I watch them at the gate, driving off. I never leave the prison during shift. I can’t go out or come in until shift is over. I can’t bring in food or water or books or anything. Just myself, just my uniform, my thoughts. There are no meals here. Twelve-hour shifts, we eat out of vending machines. I have peanut breakfasts and potato chip lunches and Coke suppers. I feel sick after every shift.
I go home and my girlfriend asks me what happened and I tell her nothing and she goes to a park. I tell her I’m too tired.
I can’t sleep. Online, I look up famous people with epilepsy — Bud Abbott, Danny Glover, Pope Pius IX, Caligula, Neil Young, Lil Wayne, Lindsey Buckingham, Adam Horovitz, Prince, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Harriet Tubman, George Gershwin, Philip K. Dick, Joan of Arc.
Lying in bed, I think of my sole seizure—and then put it out of my head, worried it will bring one on. I put on Neil Young.
I have a Ph.D.
I have a screenplay I’ve written that’s been film optioned by a production company. I had no money for a good lawyer, so I just signed the contract. I get nothing if it gets made. I want to tell the prisoners this, but they don’t need to hear about my girlfriend from France or my freedom or the possibility of making no money on a film I wrote.
Instead, the next time I go in for work, I tell them about Lil Wayne. They could care less about Joan of Arc or the Pope. They ask me about Shrimp Daddy. They want to know what caused his seizures. The prisoners, I’ve found, get into minutiae. They want me to use technical medical language to describe their self-caused avulsions, the flap of skin hanging off of the arm from the cutting. The prisoners get a high from it, escalating how bad the injury is until you get ridiculous lacerations in order to achieve the maximum amount of endorphin release.
I tell this to the pedophile.
He asks me what endorphins are.
“It’s natural opiates in the brain,” but then I quickly add, “But you can die from hypovolemic shock. And the endorphin amount will decrease over time, just like with any addiction.”
I look at his face and think of monsters, how the special effects people in cinema use the qualities of aging and the features of corpses, how that’s the essential ingredients of creating a monster. He’s probably in his thirties, this monster, but his biological age is probably late 60s. You can see drug usage on the face—amphetamine teeth, alcoholic eyes, the pustular candidiasis of heroin addicts. I know he’s guilty of addiction, the monsters of multiple addictions.
It slips out, the moment with the pedophile. My girlfriend tells me she never wants me to talk to him again. I tell her it’s like getting to sit with Satan. She tells me it is an endorphin rush for me. She uses my own language against me. She tells me she wants me out of the prison, that I’m addicted to it.
We go to the movies. There is a short prison scene. She tells me she wants to leave. We watch until the end of the movie and then drive, an ache of quiet in the car, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” unable to drown it out. We drive by lakes you can’t swim in due to the alligators, the snakes, the Vibrio vulnificus (flesh-eating bacteria that has killed two Florida residents already this year). I say this out loud and she tells me I know too much. She says they did a study and found that the least happy people had the most education, that the most suicidal were Ph.D.s, and that the happiest never graduated from college with as much as a Bachelors. She tells me that in America, happiness means having an Associates Degree and a job. In France, I reply, education is free.
I met her in China, in Shanghai, at a vegan restaurant, the only one in the city. I’m not vegan. I don’t know how I ended up in China. I hate Chinese food. I got a job there, left it as soon as I could. I couldn’t learn Chinese. It’s harder than medicine. Chinese is physics. It’s metaphysics. It’s epistemology disguised as language. I learned French in China. I got my girlfriend pregnant. Enceinte. She had the miscarriage when I was back in the States. On the phone, I promised her everything. I told her I’d protect her and work and quit the screenwriting and get the first job I could. She could move here. We’d figure things out. She can’t stay much longer. She has no visa. I tell her I’ll marry her, and she can stay as long as she wants then, forever then. She tells me that marriage is overrated. She says in France her friends don’t get married anymore. They live together, have children, and don’t worry about something as meaningless as marriage. I tell her right when homosexuals are pleading for the right to marry, women suddenly find marriage meaningless. She tells me I can marry the pedophile then and walks out. She has nowhere to go. She can’t drive. She’ll walk near the swamp. I’ll worry about her with alligators.
The next day I go to work and the guy with the swastika has killed himself. I work the patient. We switch off on CPR. He OD’d on draf, which is a mix of ecstasy and coke, the two drugs most likely to cause cardiac arrest on their own. Mix them and you’re just about guaranteeing v-fib, especially if you already have a bad heart, and he’s a white supremacist in his fifties and all of them have bad hearts.
We do paperwork, then get a call.
We declared him dead and on the way to the morgue, the swastika-throated prisoner stood up inside his body bag. Apparently he wasn’t as dead as we’d assumed.
The head nurse tells us that we can’t have any more dead people who aren’t dead. She tells us we make the prison look like a joke. She says this while standing in front of a series of wardens from the past with the worst set of mustaches in the history of civilization. I think of how the word is made up of “must” and “ache.”
We go back to work and a schizophrenic patient grabs me by the hair and won’t let go. He bashes my head against the wall three times before the Strength In Numbers come in. A person has each of his limbs. One distracts the patient ineffectively; the other does the constraints. It takes six people to constrain a patient. Seven if you count the person attacked.
I go home. My girlfriend touches my epidural hematoma. It’s the most tender she has been in weeks. She goes to kiss me. I pull away. I tell her the patient spit in my face.
“So,” she says.
I tell her the patient has hep. They have a shower room. I took a shower for thirty minutes with my eyes under the spray. We treat patient saliva like a chemical contamination. I tell her that it’s almost impossible to get HIV from a patient, that you can count on two hands the number of medical workers who have been infected by HIV from patient contact. I tell her that one in sixty health care workers will get hepatitis from a patient, that it can live in dried blood on an ambulance, that worldwide two billion people have been infected with hepatitis B. Hepatitis is our current plague. I say everything wrong. She goes walking by the swamp, at night, during alligator mating season, when the gators are out so frequently that our next-door neighbor found one under his car in his garage.
The director/producer wakes me up from sleep. He tells me that he gave the script to Keanu Reeves. Or more precisely he gave the script to a prop master he knows who gave the script to Keanu. He says Keanu read the first five pages. I ask what Keanu thought. The director tells me he’s going to wait until Keanu has read it all. I ask if Keanu would even be a fit for the film. He tells me it’s Keanu; we’ll make a part for him. I can’t believe we’re calling him Keanu when neither of us has ever met the man.
The next day we have a suicide attempt. The patient is from Kansas. He says he misses Kansas. He says he should have tried to rob a bank in Kansas instead.
I say, “So how many banks you rob?”
He tells me none, that he only thought about it.
I ask him what he did to get in prison.
He tells me he pulled out a gun in a church parking lot and started shooting in every direction. I ask why and he says because someone dared him to.
We wrap up his forearms. My partner asks him if he wants to die.
The prisoner says yes.
My partner tells him it’s impossible to die from slitting your wrists. He tells him, dead-pan, that you can’t die from cutting yourself.
“Really?”
Yes, says my partner, and pushes the guy out of the room.
We put away the gauze, log how much we used, when it was used, why it was used, on who it was used.
I tell my partner that he’s just going to find some other way to try to kill himself.
“Fine,” he says, “Long as there’s no blood involved.”
I tell my girlfriend that I don’t have hep.
She asks how I know.
I tell her they did tests. I go to kiss her. She says she’s going back to France. I ask when. She says she doesn’t know.
She comes into the bedroom and wakes me up. I tell her I have to work tomorrow. She tells me I’ve been working too much. I’m working full-time for part-time benefits. I tell her the overtime is incredible. I’m saving.
For what?
For our wedding.
I don’t want to get married.
For our child then.
She looks into the shadows in the room. I look at her shadow. I imagine her shadow bleeding. The shadow’s cervix dilating and the birth, the blood and placenta. I imagine helping her shadow with Lamaze and I imagine kissing her shadow. I imagine meeting her shadow in a vegan restaurant in the shadows of Shanghai.
I tell her I’ll quit.
She goes back to Paris.
She texts me, Facetimes me, emails me.
I can’t take my phone into the prison. I go home and find nine photos, of cathedrals and a shoe shop and a statue of a centaur with her and her sister and a building labeled American Restaurant and the river, the river, the river, and again the river.
The prisoners tell me my nickname. It’s Grim. Or The Reaper.
I wear black scrubs for the most part. They tell me I look like Death. They say that the prisoners all know that they are near death when I arrive, but that I cure them every time. They tell me I’m bad at being Death.
They ask if someone just died in my family. They say I look down. I tell them the concept of “flat effect,” of “blunted effect,” how a person can lose the ability to show emotions. They say that everyone in the prison has flat effect. A prison is flat effect. There are no prisons on hills. Prison is for flatlands, for empty holes of space where civilization doesn’t want to be. It’s where we build when no one wants to build there. I tell them we have more than 5,000 jails and prisons in the U.S. A hundred for every state. We have more prisons than universities. More prisoners than people living on college campuses. More prisoners than the entire population of New Mexico. Half of the world’s prison population is in the U.S., China, and Russia.
The head nurse asks me what I’ve been saying to the prisoners.
I tell her that I haven’t said anything about my private life.
She asks if I’ve been pushing them to riot.
Of course not.
She quotes me.
I hold out. I want to explode an answer, but I remember an episode of House where they said that Hugh Laurie’s character needed to learn responsibility, to take ownership for his actions.
It works. She tells me what I’ve said is true. She said it’s fine to think the truth, but I don’t need to say it, especially not to prisoners.
I go to the park after work. It’s summer, the day lasting long. An entire array of flowers and vegetation is in front of me, but I get caught up in the small letter of the plant and wildlife signs. I read about how Crotalaria spectabilis is “quite toxic for both man and beast.” I read how 93% of plants are non-edible. I remember a paramedic instructor once saying that daffodil bulbs may be fatal if eaten, that mistletoe at Christmas can kill you, that poison hemlock looks like a large carrot but it will kill you. I remember the juxtaposition of beautiful plants on a screen behind him and then the phrase “will kill you.” I try to pull myself away from the sign.
I try to walk in a park like a normal person, like someone without a Ph.D. in Screenwriting. I’m not allowed to be called Doctor at the hospital. I’d have to explain over and over again that I have a doctorate in film. I’d have to let the patients know that I can’t officially diagnose their diseases, but I can write a scene about treating them when I go home.
The director calls me and tells me that Keanu hated my screenplay. I ask for more details than that. He tells me that Keanu hated the first five pages of my screenplay and never read any more of it. I ask him if Keanu would have even been a good fit. He says hell no, it wouldn’t even make sense for him to be in the movie.
A friend emails me and says my director/producer has links to porn.
The pedophile tells me he’s been going to the chapel.
I tell him good.
He thanks me.
I ask for what.
He says I told him that he should find Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.
I say I never told him that.
He says I did.
He walks away. I never see him again. He never comes back to us with rectal contraband bleeding or a band name carved in his stomach. He disappears into the strange grace found, I suppose, somewhere in some prisons.
I go to France. I take a week off. It takes two days to get there, two days to get back. So I just have a weekend with my girlfriend that will cost me the money I’ve saved. I tell her I have nothing left after this trip. She says it’s very romantic for me to say that. I tell her that I could stay; I’m allowed to be there for up to three months. I tell her I can reschedule my flight, that I’ll get fired for her. We’ll figure it out. I tell her this while standing in front of a building in Lille. It has a cannonball in its side. She tells me it’s from a war. We find out later that the story is a lie. The cannonball was put there for promotional purposes, an odd publicity stunt that worked. The cannonball has been painted recently to look like a tit. The building has a breast. I see this behind her while trying to say “I love you” in a way that’s different from any way I’ve ever heard in a film before.
We walk. In the distance, peeking out high above the buildings, a steeple keeps getting closer to us, like it’s been waiting a long time.
–Ron Riekki
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