House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

Marion Prison

M A R I O N P R I S O N Next to killing someone or trying to escape, the most serious offenses that a prisoner in the US Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, can commit are drinking and being caught in possession of money. There are many ways to make alcohol in USP-Marion,but the simplest is to take two small boxes of Kellogg’s corn flakes and dump them into the toilet bowl in your cell. Let them fester for a week, and the result will get you drunk. Some inmates are more ambitious than that. From the prison log: “August , : Approximately four gallons of brew found in cell of Ronnie Bruscino, -.” It is part of the magical transmutation of elements that occurs in the most maximum state of incarceration in America today: Marion Prison. After an extended period of being locked up with nothing to do, cut off from the sight of other human beings, the sounds and smells of normal life, you begin to see the world transform itself. Nothing is as it seems. One thing changes into another. If you stare at a typewriter for long enough with nothing else to occupy your mind, nothing else to stimulate your senses,the platen rods begin to look like shish kabob skewers.Then one day you find yourself with one of them in your hand, and it has been sharpened, and you have wrapped a sweatband around the blunt end for a better grip,and you are plunging the point into someone’s chest.Jack Henry Abbott,convicted murderer and author of In the Belly of the Beast, wrote,“It is like cutting hot butter , no resistance at all.” The guards come and take you away.The administration orders the typewriters removed from the library. You are locked in your cell. You are left with nothing but the steel bunk,three walls,the air vent,the grille. But after you’ve stared at the air vent for months on end, it too begins to change. Instead of the metal frame and duct, you begin to see long,  gleaming isosceles triangles. You get a four-inch bit of hacksaw blade that someone at Lewisburg Penitentiary swallowed before he was transferred here and expelled from his body upon arrival, a scrap of metal that has been passed from man to man,mouth to mouth,rectum to rectum , hand to hand, by the fleeting practiced prestidigitation of inmates making contact on the way to the shower or the visiting room.You spend weeks gently sawing at the edge of the air vent with this tiny bit of serrated metal,and each day you putty the cut you’ve made,using a mixture of Dial and Ivory soap, blended to match the flesh-colored paint that seems to obscure everything in this prison. And when you’ve finally sawed the shank of metal free from the edge of the vent, you spend another week (or two or three—you have time, nothing but time) on your hands and knees, patiently rubbing it against the concrete floor whenever the guards aren’t looking, until it becomes pointed like that isosceles triangle you dreamed of.Then you work on it some more until it is sharp enough to shave with. It’s almost art. You ignite a book of matches and melt your toothbrush to make a handle for the pristine knife. Then one day you find yourself plunging it into someone’s chest. And the guards take the metal beds away and replace them with concrete slabs, and they throw you in the hole with nothing but a Bible and your underwear and a bed sheet.So you soak the Bible in the toilet until it is water-logged and weighs fifteen pounds, and you wrap it in your T-shirt, and when the guard comes to get you for your weekly shower, you swing it overhead like a bludgeon and fracture his skull. All of these things have happened at USP-Marion. An entry in the prison’s log: April , : While being processed for a U.S. District Court appearance, inmate Bryan, Joseph - was found to be in possession of two () handcuff keys made from a “Doodle Art Pen.”They were found hidden in the hollowed out bottom of his tennis shoe. The keys were made to fit the S & W handcuffs carried by the U.S.Marshall’s Service.Bryan was in the Control Unit (H-Unit) at the time...