PRISON MEMORIES
Never forgotten. Always lurking in the shadows of the past, ready to pounce, seize and hold on forever. They will cease only when that final sleep comes.
One such memory recently rushed at me like a bull charging a taunting rodeo clown. I was standing in an early morning shower. The wife was sleeping, always beautiful in the world of peace while the two dogs, in their separate beds, chased cats across the meadows of biscuit land. I just happen to notice two deep, permanent scars on my right forearm. For a brief, fleeting moment I lost track of of how they occurred.
It was the winter of 1974 in Cellblock C, a punitive maximum security lockdown at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—more commonly known as “Angola” because it is less than a mouthful to say. The cold was blowing steady into my cell. All the windows across the hallway that ran down the double tiered cellblock had been smashed out during a brief uprising by men upset at a late chow cart and the attitude of the guard in charge of the cellblock. The result of the uprising: no more than three inmates could be in the hallway for showering at a time and the windows would not be replaced over the next 18 months. And the chow cart didn’t get any more punctual.
The smell of burnt human flesh still circulated by the cold breeze. The day before one inmate, to settle some beef about a casual slight, threw a pint jar of gasoline into the cell of another inmate as he lay sleeping and set the startled inmate ablaze. His screams could be heard throughout the cellblock complex. The smell of gasoline and burnt flesh lingered long after the injured inmate had been removed. I saw burned flesh hanging off the side of the stretcher as two inmate orderlies carried him off the tier.
I was terribly sick with flu-like symptoms that day. I knew I needed medical treatment but there was only one protocol for cellblock inmates to get a trip to the prison medical clinic: blood. Doctors from the free world only came to the clinic (or “the pital” as inmates called it) once a week. The rest of the time clinic was staffed by inmate medical orderlies who got their training on a “catch-can” basis—trial and error.
Other inmates got the cellblock duty officer to respond to my cell.
“What’s the fucking problem, Sinclair,” the guard said as he walked up to my cell, holding a tuna fish sandwich with his left hand and scratching his ass with the other.
“I need to see ‘the doctor,’” I said. “I’m in bad shape here. This flu or whatever this shit is, is killing me.”
“Fuck, and just fuck me again,” he responded in between a bite of tuna fish. “Okay, okay – you’re dying here. You know the drill … gotta show me some blood if you want to see that nitwit doctor.”
The “drill” was that the inmate had to self-mutilate to get a security escort to the clinic.
With razor blade in left hand, I pulled up the right sleeve of my sweatshirt and slashed my forearm. Blood immediately started to flow.
“No, no,” guard said, swallowing last bite of the tuna sandwich, wiping the fish smell on his rear pants pocket. “That little cut there won’t even get to the cellblock lobby for a band aid. I need to know you’re really sick – give me some of that red blood, sorta like a bone deep cut.”
At that time I was into my ninth year of a 40-year prison incarceration and I despised the guard—or any other motherfucker wearing a uniform.
“Alright, asshole,” I said, using the razor blade to whack a deep gash in my arm just an inch from the other wound. Blood poured out of the wound.
“Is that good enough?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said letting loose a mule-like fart. “Shit, that might even get you a trip to charity hospital in New Orleans.”
He then turned and yelled to an inmate orderly (more commonly known then as “convict guards”): “Rack Sinclair’s door – he just got an escort to the pital.”
Two hours later I was back in the cell. An inmate medical orderly gave me a small brown envelop with some penicillin pills in it. The doctor said he suspected I had pneumonia, but said the antibiotics should clear it up. He also told me to take aspirin three or four times a day.
That’s the memory the sight of the two scars brought back to me during a 4:30 early morning shower. That was 50 years ago. The scars, and their memory, remain burned in my brain.
I’ve now been under the continuous custody of the Louisiana penal system for 59 years—and today I am a middle-class husband, homeowner, gainfully employed 80-year-old parolee who had successfully managed the rigors of the free world under parole supervision for 18 years without a blemish.
And, oh yeah, I still hate all those Louisiana sonuvabitches.