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Beat Down Crew Them boys been fighting all their lives. They invented the word assault. —Phil Rowen Hey, I worked the Texas death house for five years, I don’t think this place is all that violent. —Chief of Security Walker The housing unit where I was living was changed into an educational unit, and so we were all moved off into new units and new cells. I was moved onto the unit that most inmates called the Aryan unit. That was because all the Aryans lived there. Out of forty prisoners on the unit, there were maybe five Blacks who lived there, and maybe five Whites who were not Aryan. I was one of those five Whites. My old cellie Mark also moved onto the same unit, but we were in separate cells, with him on the ground floor and me on the tier. Like me, Mark was White. He claimed he wasn’t Aryan, but he sure knew them and hung out with them, so he settled right in. The problem was that his extreme polar nature and his desire for drugs got the best of him. I was standing in the dayroom, leaning against the shower wall. Luke was standing next to me as we gabbed. Suddenly, Steel and Hammer’s cell door flung open. “Get the fuck out of here,” Steel yelled as the two of them threw Mark out of their cell. I could see Mark’s face was cut. He staggered to his feet and then headed back into the cell. Knowing Mark, it didn’t surprise me that he was going to take the two of them on. I had known Steel from Gladiator School up North. Sometimes I used to buy weed from him. He was a small-town boy in his forties who was doing his time on the installment plan. When I knew him back then, Todd (aka Steel) wasn’t much of a banger. Yet, over the years he became a 5 49 higher-up in the Aryans. At Enterprise prison, he blossomed into a leadership role. Many of the men from Northern State were young Whites with little prison experience. They thought that Enterprise’s gangs and violence were the norm, so they joined the Aryans for protection. I’ll have to admit that, while I lived on the Aryan unit, I was more comfortable— the Black gangs didn’t show their faces much on that unit. Hammer was also someone I knew from Gladiator School. He was in his mid-forties with long, sandy-blond hair balding at the top. Like Steel, he was doing his time on the installment plan. At Gladiator School, I had taken some college classes with him, where I thought he was stiff and controlling . He certainly hated the system, the very system he had come back to. Because I was not an Aryan and because I was cool with Lowe, who was Black, Hammer thought of me as a nigger-lover. Now Hammer was a higher-up in the Aryans, kind of like an educator for the younger Whites. Mark charged right into their cell. Both Steel and Hammer swung on him and backed him out of the cell again. “Stay the fuck out of here,” Steel repeated. About this time, more Aryans showed their faces and were ready to aid Steel and Hammer. Assaulting six-on-one is much different than one-onone or even two-on-one, so when Mark was backed from the cell the second time, I called to him. I could see he was only getting beat, but he ignored me. I wasn’t about to step in to help him. I could see he was pumped full of hootch and pills. So were the Aryans. It was the weekend party—they would drink a bunch of hootch that had the effect of weak wine, take a bunch of pills they collected from the psychiatrist, and smoke a bunch of weed. By ten o’clock in the evening, half of them would be staggering around. The problem was that Mark wanted some weed but the Aryans weren’t sharing. So he was furious—he thought it just wasn’t right. Another man managed to get Mark to go back to his own cell but, sure enough, Mark could not leave it alone. You ain’t going to win against ten motherfuckers, I thought, but Mark headed right back into their cell. Immediately he was back out...

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