I’ll Have My Cake And Punch You Too

September 23, 2000

Some major excitement went on today. I was in the chow line for dinner when a fight broke out in front of the line. One of the participants just happened to be my celly. The guard on the line was a new one, a woman named Bell. She was scared to death screaming “shoot em, shoot em” to the guard in the gun post above us. At this we all dove to the ground without even being told so. The gun post officer fired a couple of warning shots and and the fight finally stopped. And here we have a little bridge into the mind of what inmates view as the typical prison guard. She wants these guys to be shot over a simple fist fight. Possibly she was just scared, maybe I should give her that.

But if you’re that frightened, is this really the best line of work for you. Then again people are working jobs that don’t suit them the best everywhere. Why should prison be any different? I found out the fight was over a piece of cake. The guy in front of my celly didn’t like the size of his dessert, so he slid the piece from my celly’s tray onto his. Now they would have put another on slice on there Steve asked, but I guess the real issue was the guy touched his tray. There was no changing that.

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I don’t think they liked each other too much either. Later I had to spend over an hour inventorying  Steve’s belongings to be sent over with him to the hole. And now I will have to find a new celly which is a pain in the ass. Steve had been around the system and was respected here. He taught me quite a bit. He was a bit too much on the racist side for me, but, again, what do you expect in here. The biggest plus was I knew he was not a sex-offender. No one wants to live with one of those. That was why he asked me to move in. He used to like to wrestle a lot too(a fight I always lost), I also chalked this up to the world I live in. The thing I will remember most was he said I looked like the wrestler “The Rock”-on crack.

I don’t see the resemblance but my friends used to call me Crack on the street. Finally, no one ever let Miss Bell hear the end of her performance during the scuffle. People imitated her for weeks in their best female voice, “shoot em, shoot em”.