Back into the hole.

There were pretty much only two preachers who worked at the church.  This night it's the older one.  He doesn't make sense to me.  Practically white hair with the comb over, tall guy, but has the slumped shoulders with the short goofy walk.  Talks about Jesus as if he knows him personally or something.  I am pretty sure that Jesus has been dead a long time.  I always just tuned him out.  Roger is sitting next to me, on my right.  We are at the end of the pew right by the isle.  I always prefer to sit towards the back.  This preacher will call on people by name too.  He is quite aggressive about his message sometimes.  He gets carried away with it, and doesn't really pay attention to what is going on.  For all his faults in thinking he was quite sincere about what he was doing. 

This dude behind me is talking shit.  Somehow Roger knew him from FRDC or something, so he's on the wrong side of the church.  Thinks he is being funny.  He reaches over my right shoulder and pulls at my shirt.  He's talking mad shit.  Talks about having his boys in Two House get at me.  Dude is seriously trying to pick on me.  He's laughing.  He doesn’t know I can’t stand to be picked on.  I turned my head and told him to keep his hands to himself.  He's hard to understand.  I'm not fluent in gangster yet.  He's talking mad shit.  My confidence aggravates him big time.  He must not be able to sense my energy rising.  In his mind he thinks I should be acting afraid or something.  He reaches over my shoulder again and pulls at my shirt.  I turn my head and warn him again not to touch me. 

I look at Roger as I turn my head back forward.  He's ready.  It’s an unspoken rule that I don’t warn a person three times.  The dude says some shit about Two House again, and reaches his hand up over my shoulder.  Soon as his fingers hit my shoulder I slammed my right fist into his face, back handed, as hard as I could.  I tried to send my point knuckle through his nose.  He had his face all the way up over my shoulder when I made contact.  His nappy dreads went flying.  I stood as I turned out of the pew.  I was coming around with my left, but he flew back into his pew out of reach.  All the black guys on the other side of the isle stood up, and then all the white guys on my side stood up.  I looked at the dude; they called him Betts, and told him what's up.  I said for him to keep his hands off me.

It’s all happening at once.  He's looking stupid now.  He's acting like his boy is holding him back somehow.  The dude wasn’t really holding him back at all.  I told him straight to his face.  If I tell you to keep your hands off me, I fucking mean it.  As everyone stood up the preacher was on the phone calling for guards.  He was all stressed out.  His congregation wasn’t standing for the right reasons.  Betts didn't want to fight.  Betts didn't want that busted nose either.  Betts thought he was scaring a white boy.  What he really wanted was to learn to keep his hands to himself.  His stupid ass picked on the wrong white boy.  I didn’t care how many boys he had in Two House.  I didn't care one bit about going to the hole, especially if it was for smashing some punk kids face for not keeping his hands to himself.  

Back into the hole I go.  8 House.  Segregation.  It sits directly in the middle of the prison.  The familiar clank, buzz, and slam of steel doors.  High tech security.  Back to pacing an eight by ten.  I was getting to spend my first Christmas free in prison back in the hole.  That church incident was like three or four days before Christmas.  I really didn't care about Christmas.  We got the same nasty food in the hole as they got in the chow hall.  In prison the only thing different on any given holiday is the food.  8 House was just a long corridor with cells down both sides.  It was two stories though.  All the completely out of control gangsters were in there.  Apparently they don't sleep when they are in the hole.  It's never ever quiet in there.

Good news is, if you tell the cops the blacks were just messing with you and all you did was stand up for yourself; you get out of the hole in seven days!  Seven days!  I could do that standing on my head.  Seven days was nothing.  Seven days was a nice vacation from the ghetto.  When I went in I was figuring on being in there for months or something, but I was out in a week.  Booneville just got a lot sweeter, I mean for being in prison and all.  The ability to smash a guy’s face and only do a week in the hole sweetened the pot big time.  It changed the game.  I knew then I wasn’t ever going to be taking any shit off of some punk ass gangster.  It turns out the prison staff liked a white boy who stands up for himself. 

Some guys tried to criticize me, saying I checked in, fighting in the middle of church like that, but they didn't get it.  They were also the dudes that take stupid crap off of gangsters. If I get into a fight with some gangsters we are going to the hole no matter what.  There wouldn't be any getting away with it.  I put that dude on blast right on the spot.  I sent a message that day without really realizing it to practically the whole prison.  It was the right message too.  Betts did have boys in Two House, and they were waiting for me to get out of the hole.

I was practically dancing when I got out, but I was still a little worried about going back into the house.  I am the only white dude in the bay.  None of the white boys in the house are going to come running to my rescue.  Worst case was me getting rolled under some bunks.  I’m just not that easy to whoop though so if I’m fighting again, it would just mean another seven days in the hole.  If I kept fighting they would just move me to another house.  Another seven days was nothing.  Hell that was still just half a month.  The only bad thing about doing time in 8 House was the lack of books.  All I could get was the bible.  Prayers didn't seem to help get a person out of prison, so the bible wasn't really helping me out much in life.  It sure the hell doesn’t get you out of the hole. 

When I went to the hole the guard put my locker in the closet behind the desk.  Finding that out was a great relief.  I figured that if my locker got left out in the bay my stuff would be gone.  I coveted my pictures and letters.  I had assumed the worst.  Most of the guys were out on the yard when I got out so there weren't a lot of people in the House.  Flip was there though; he didn’t waste any time, and asked me what was up.  He wasn’t coming at me all hard or anything.  He was smiling about it in a weird way.  He was an older cat, twenty three or four, pretty chill.  His gang notoriety was established so he didn’t have to prove anything.  He had an old number.  He had respect with most everyone in the house.  I still didn’t understand all their hierarchies.  I knew crossing him though would make life very rough. 

He asked what was up with his boy Betts.  Figures Betts knows this guy.  I don’t even have the tape off my locker yet.  I shrugged my shoulders and told Flip, "I told him to quit grabbing my shoulder, and he kept putting his hand on me, so I hit him in the face."  I just said it straight up.  Told him I am not looking for trouble, but if a dude is going to mess with me, we are going to fight.  I don't care who it is.  He kind of laughed about it, made light of it.  I was surprised.  He said something about Betts liking to run his mouth too much.  I think maybe the blacks were making fun of Betts for how I did him.  I mean I did smash his face right in the middle of church. 

It was weird because things lightened up after that in the bay.  I'm not saying they were all friendly to me, but they kind of accepted me after that.  I never messed with any of them.  I just did my own thing as best I could while living in a gangster circus.  Read books, worked out.  The tension definitely went down several notches after I got out of the hole.  Maybe they were relieved I got my second test somewhere else other than them having to do it.  A few of them would even talk to me now and then.  Some of them would even joke with me.  It had to of been obvious as could be what a red neck white boy I was.  To them it had to be glaringly obvious.  Despite our cultural differences they ended up respecting me in a weird sort of way. 

A few weeks after that there was some racial shit going on in the house.  I’m still the new guy, so this is not cool.  It takes quite a while to become known in prison.  I never really left my bay, so I was pretty clueless as to what was going on in the general population.  All I ever do is meet Roger on the yard to lift weights, and play hand ball.  I didn't really hang out with any of the other people in the house, but I could tell something was wrong.  I could just feel it.  There was some wild tension in the house.  The circus volume was higher.  Some shit was in the air.  I was in the bay trying not to pace.  My pacing always made the gangsters really nervous.  The guys in my bay weren't saying what's up either, but I'd heard a few of them mumbling.  I was psyching myself up.  Whenever the guard would walk away from his desk I made sure I was ready.  I had my boots on. 

Craziest shit ever happened.  Three cats come walking into the bay.  Flip is standing there mumbling with a couple of other dudes from our own bay like he has been waiting for this to happen.  It seems like Flip is trying not to make a big scene.  The three dudes want to talk to the white boy.  They are all worked up and speaking slang to the point I don’t really know what the hell they are saying.  I’m standing at the back of the bay debating which one I am going to lock onto. No matter what that guy is going to get it.  Flip tells them to take their shit elsewhere, says they don't want that drama in their bay.  The gangster speak is ridiculous.  They double check with Flip that they heard him right.  Some other cats in the bay are standing at their bunks, watching, waiting.  The three dudes turned and left, running their mouths about white boys as they went, fading into the cacophony; Circus in full effect. 

I couldn't believe what just happened.  I was getting ready to be fighting who knows how many cats. I was envisioning a fucking free for all, with me being the all. It’s absolutely critical to knock one of them out or down right off the get.  Flip never said shit to me.  None of them did really, but they stopped those gangsters from bringing me into their bullshit.  They just went back to their business. 

You see, I was fully aware that my being white was not the reason they got held down in life.  Had those cats tried to be racist with me we would have been fighting. If I couldn't call them the N word, they weren't going to be calling me a honky, or cracker, or whatever.  They weren't going to get in my face because of how I was born.  If they wanted me to show them respect they were going to show it to me, or it was going to get sketchy.  I would tell them that right to their face too.  I learned a secret really quickly in there.  There are not many things gangsters fear more than a crazy ass white boy.  Fear is respect. 

You see that was what that whole business with Betts was about.  I didn’t hit him to be a dick, or to take advantage of him.  It wasn’t because he was black.  I did it because I wasn’t going to let him be rude to me, not even for a minute.  In the hyper masculine world you can't take any shit; ever.  That's the only way to truly keep the wolves at bay.  Sticking up for one's self transcends race. 

Flip respected me for that.  It turned out a bunch of them did. Their racial issues had very little to do with me, and some of them knew it.  I wasn't the white man that was holding them down.  I didn't mind them being angry about it. If I were them I would be furious too. It is a legitimate ordeal.  It's a real thing they deal with in life.  It just wasn’t me doing it to them. 

What a lot of them didn't know was that white people do it to white people.  White people don’t reserve their nasty ways for blacks.  I know exactly what it feels like to be held down by a bunch of selfish rich white people.  I obviously have no clue what it is like to be black, but I do know how evil white people can be.  Some of those guys were too bitter about the color of my skin to see I was in the same situation they were in.  I too had been thrown under the bus by some selfish greedy people.  It’s not a racial thing, but a cultural thing.  A lot of those gangsters couldn’t see past the color of a person’s skin.  They were doing exactly what they claimed they hated white people for doing.  They couldn’t see deeply into the matter. They couldn’t see deeply into themselves.