Ricardo Cortez Cruz
A Little Warm Death
Contains a taste of The Salt Eaters and In Cold Blood
The prisoner’s life is violently interrupted, enclosed with a parenthesis. The point is to create the fiction that he doesn’t exist. Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days.
— John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers
If [Edgar Allan] Poe were alive today, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
—Richard Wright
See every life brings a moment of intense hatred…. Even hatred flashbacks, are subsequently losing it/Niggas without guns are those who used to using it.
—Jean Grae, “Code Red,” featuring Block McCloud and Pumpkinhead
You can’t take your ass anywhere
“You already in everything but a hearse/casket/coffin/box,” Blood said, runnin’. “I gotta getaway.” Blood had finally started talking to Queenetta before that trapped feeling of negrophobia could hit her as she sat sideways on a stool, wigging out, popping her cherry gum inside the crowded state prison where her subject was. “Shoot, I know what is being said about me and you can take my side or theirs, that’s your biz’ness—it’s your thing, but you are losing—you are losing the thread of the story, yo’,” Blood added, running down some lines in response to the women’s trouble Queenetta encountered while cooped up.
These were not happy times. She was messy, period. As if hooking up with an inmate satisfied her own criminogenic need, the black woman becoming doomed seeking sanctuary, in prison.
Imagining herself as clubbing—this trek just another dance, Queenetta, looking snatched, entered the prison industrial complex. The long sentences that seemed to be mandatory for this particular setting started closing in on her, a prima donna, this luscious dame who did not want to be the after-thot. This B side of her becoming more than she can handle. All kinds of negroes behind bars and in line for male call dreaming of dashing up to her, smashing her with the interrobang.
Queenetta took in the horror of the grit and grim(e): The infantile, musclebound, yo(l)ked black man-childs—body snatchers—talking smack to her in PC but also skating around everything in fear of being speared, the baby mamas checking in and bringing their dark seed, the vampires in the dungeon drawing blood, dis/membered bodies of the Trinity Brotherhood in chairs and strolling past her with machetes, a few chumps on boats sinking downwards worse than the Friday the 13th victims on Crystal Lake, and a row of brothers off the chain roughly eyeballing her while they try to seduce her with trap music.
“Are you sure you wanna be saved?” Queenetta the vamp asked herself as the accompaniment to this circus. Pregnant with ideas for change and reform—as ravenous as the wolves locked in confinement—she tried to be a stand-up person, clinging to a gross/grotesque version of Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (only a ruler on the cover). She was starting to lose her composure as she drifted to thoughts of her idol, bell hooks, writing about killing rage, the prison speaker touching her ear and the silence of the lambs even telling her then that she had to get out—it was time to go.
Don’t go
Queenetta…. They must have seen the B side of her coming from a mile away, acting too boogee for her own good. They must have peeped her chest sticking way too far out or something. Looking sexcellent. Or, herd/heard all of the hesitation in a/her heartbeat. There were so many voices in Cell Block H. Witch called out to her. Everybody wanting to rap her ass. Curse (to) her. Get her attention through 16 bars. Who are you? they asked. Why you here? What now?
As if the foreperson of a jury—herself under trial, Queenetta foremanly formally rehearsed her answers: “I am a 45-year-old mulatta originally from Miami. Former Teen Miss USA. I’m almost over the hill with secrets. And I can’t help it if I talk like I got dick up my ass. Now, I’ve arrived as a beat reporter for The Source in New York City. Not that people need to know these things about me, but I want folks to know that I’ve had to work hard, I mean really go through some funky stuff, to get here.
“I am the daughter of Destiny. My Aunt Trinity prefers to call me Myesha, my middle name, since Myesha is the sweetest girl you’ll ever meet; she’s sensitive and shy, the quiet type. However, while I might be precious, I’m not up for any abuse or attacks on my character.
“Rest assured, Mr. Man, that I know what I’m doing. No, my big afro with tangles and loops and black kitchens does not mean that I’m trying to be like Angela Davis or The Lady of Rage. Like Rage or Sista Souljah, I don’t want to be remembered for just one thing, anyway. Such as dissing the President. Those of you who are in administration will recognize. I covered Attica in ‘71 and the Rodney King riots in ‘92, but, to be honest, I’ve never covered something as fucked-up, apparently, as this quiet riot. Excuse my etiquette. ‘Scuse me. Just don’t abuse me.
“Yes, it’s true, I’ve been going through some changes lately, as my editor suggests, I’ve got men stopping/stomping me out on the street, but I’m alright. Just cooperate, be nice to me, and I’ll be out your way a lot sooner than you think. I’m not the Feds, some naïve agent in a camouflage, or camisole with straps, waiting to be sniffed by Hannibal Lecter. I’m not a manhunter. And even if you do regard me as a black person, then know that I am more than that. Capitalize the ‘b.’ I realize that I am bright, but I am not one of your ‘spooks’ or ‘little bitches.’ True, I look unusually pale, maybe even ghastly to you peckerwoods, but at least have some respect for the dead; that’s all I ask of you cats. All I want from you window-watchers, especially the beasts.”
Queenetta was talking to herself when she stepped into the prison cafeteria, bugs and billies all around, adding to her feeling of being vulnerable to attack. LOL negroes on cell phones placing emergency calls perched themselves in the walk(a)ways. Reached out to her. Had her. Got her. Sang “Heigh Ho” to her. Swayed her into almost conducting an SOS.
She found herself immediately confronted by 12 Disciples, all but one harboring a grudge against her and anticipating one day checking out, sitting at a long rectangular table with cosmic slop in their food trays, their dread/locks dangling into their milk while in gluttony they ate. Many of them appeared to be really cooking now, churning out lies much darker in form than the stuff in Disney’s amusing animated film. Crackpots suggesting this meal would be their last supper. Trying to clown her, they yacked and gave her jib and smeared petroleum on their skin as if the act wasn’t weird at all. They said they really needed some tits but would try to answer her questions. “Yeah, we know him,” they answered, dubbing her subject “Classic Monster,” the miscreation with the defective closure, then telling her their own monstrous versions of the story.
“The truth is, we’re all a ‘tear-her,’ lusus naturae,” said Judas, one of them niggas in and out, reading all of the time, shit not relevant to him, watching Hustle & Flow, pushing Square John aside and just waiting for early release into the free world so he could see Queenetta again, eating only small pieces of his barbecue beef before lighting a smoke and deliberately burning his flesh in six places, the rest of the group abruptly wheeling around to face him, as if in shock, a few of them wishing for gay housing even now. “And you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this will take as the snake gets a thick skin.
“But,” Judas adds, “Peter’s the one who really wanted some of that ass. Peter couldn’t wait to whack him. If you really want the titan, then release the Kraken! Ask the crackhead Saint Peter.”
“Too much information, playa hata,” snapped a wounded Peter, monitoring the situation and somewhat limp. His feelings hurt. His disability not as obvious. Suddenly he knocked the marijuana cigarette out of Judas’s hand and slapped the taste out of betrayal’s mouth, flipped over his brown tray and crates, stabbed the end of his plate with a plastic fork, and began violently tossing salad. To Queenetta, it was nonverbal communication warning her to leave this mess alone.
“From jump, my name’s Simeon, no matter what Judas tells you —Peter’s my slave name, and I never liked that bitch,” brother said. “Never never never I didn’t care for him I couldn’t because I never knew him never never never Jesus I only know how he looked at us like he was God when he first came here how he said he was sorry ‘sorry’ I said ‘sorry yaw hear that—he said he was sorry’ sorry, sorry, sorry! He said he was sorry! ‘Lawd, did yaw hear that?’ I axed. And then in the lion’s den with the wrath of Cain I pushed him through a panel of thin sheet glass with all kinds of fingerprints on it like dat witch did in the movie Craft, the one nominated by MTV for best fight scene. He gave me the red eye and just disrespected a brother by saying: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock you shall build your church, and the gates of some nigger heaven shall not prevail against it.’”
“Is it me or did somebody rationing this foodstuff put a little too much flava in our chow, too much color in our provisions, too much red-/die on our plates?” Judas asked, raising up from his chair, his eyes rapidly blinking in Queenetta’s view like an ambulance leaving the scene and signaling the pain inside.
Don’t go
Marinate on this first
Making water in their cells, negroes nodded their big heads in the direction of the infamous hole in the wall where her subject had first slept during his bootie droughts and before he got moved. “Thank you,” Queenetta said, and, with headlights, she walked down the dark corridor, ducking the kites flying all around, moving toward isolation, despite their warnings, feeling salty and full of sass like the two white victims were rumored to have been as they were cut at with knives till they died. Only Queenetta also felt geechee; socializing with natural born killers, these Chester Himes real cool killers, was not the glamorous life she had dreamed of during the days when she attended City College.
“Next time you come back, Girlie, thank us with a bottle, Skank,” snapped a basehead with braids who, from behind bars, called himself Snoop. Swallowing another nigga’s banana as if playing in Fear Factor. His street name Blackball (as motherfuckers cried out). After flipping his Rap Pages in Queenetta’s presence, he got all up in her face and in her eye, shutting the opening of his white pants. “Wish I could dissociate myself from all of this,” he said.
“Yo’ Ace, if you get wit Monster but find yo’self still looking for closure, I got some mo’ shit for your ass,” somebody else hollered. “Nobody knows why my brotha fucked wit white teens,” the voice threw out at Queenetta, “but I do know, though you small and pale enough, you might ultimately be too old for his ass.”
A couple of sneaky niggas in bo-bo’s, the serial-killer type—scar(r)ed with violence—kept referring to themselves as Dre and Tupac while spitting revolting stuff and singing “Kalifornia” [sic] in the backdrop like they were filming it. “Ride wit us,” they begged. Other inmates hurled contraband, including pieces of broken pottery and luxuries used for pleasure, toward Queenetta’s tight ass as she tried to escape.
Next time come correct
“Are you sure?” Queenetta asked, suit-casin’, looking around the prison, staring up at the ghetto penthouses and down toward the ding wing, stepping over bricks of cigarettes and consumed road kill, growing restless after examining society’s devices for exclusion. Queenetta was sitting on a heater, the Correctol laxative (making her butt move) almost mildly cathartic as she attempted to purge herself of all the shit bothering her.
The thought of returning to this “Snitch”-nigga with a vial of cocaine or prescriptions or brake/break fluid had started working her nerves. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like the guards or corrections officers wouldn’t let her sneak, wasn’t that she hadn’t done it before. (Queenetta nearly fell over on her stool, let her tagless black panties show, which looked like one big hole.) It was all very tiring. Joints hidden by secondhand dress pained her, belly ached. Itchy skin, sore muscles. Even her urine appeared dark.
And
Her beads dropped onto her blouse as sweat, Queenetta hemorrhaging dark, deep secrets, the silicon in her still-small breasts privately seeping, her nipples bleeding underneath the white cotton like black berries marking her with the stains of some sort of postfeminist voodoo that be/came rather confused. Sweating herself was a reminder to Queenetta of the unrelenting nightmares she experienced as a mixed woman in denial; the sweet, chocolate, nut-brown man that she had quietly dumped seven years ago by forcing him out of her apartment at knifepoint had killed himself, riding shotgun or bitch or as the result of having himself in the front seat of his jeep while the radio played “Until.” An automobile shooting through traffic got him. He was hit on the freeway. Queenetta had spent the rest of her life weeping for the bitch-ass nigga, often speeding through rush-hour traffic while scratching herself until her skin turned red and screamed for her to stop, cursing other drivers like a devil in a blue dress, bitter, scrutinizing every colored story as if everybody was talking about her and her ex-lover.
Now, wasn’t it time to stop?
Such a fucking lady needs to learn how to move on
“Prison-yard queens will put their business into anything with a hole in it,” the gaming warden Irving (or, was it Oliver or Chuck?) Stone said to Queenetta, pressing her flesh before slithering off to the side of her, one of his paws refusing to release a germ. “That’s the goddamn truth, my little Precious-thing,” Stone said, offensively mixing up her name, the man hiding himself from the surveillance cameras, writing notes and spewing about Monster and other gay black men like they were no longer a part of the living.
“Most of the coons you’d love in this place are already on a bad-news list,” Stone said in an effort to put her in check.
As counsel, Stone gave this hincty, seddity, ostrich, Olive-Oyl heifer his caveat, and that was fuckin’ it, all he was willing to do for her. He wasn’t going to break his neck for this skinny dipper. He had serious problems of his own at Rikers to think about: an entire community griping over the return of chain gangs; the White Nation giving him a nigger’s bankroll and asking him for favors; two devils, ugly as sin and caught fighting in rec basketball over a pair of Avant Guards sneaks, locked in ad seg, solitary, but tagging his walls intentionally to create some strange postmodern blackness; judges, and even that mother for a governor, ordering him to lay low. A real concern was the possibility of a disturbance. And now the capper was this bright skeezer of unknown origin passing for white and shuffling into his goddamn office with salt on her face and the audacity to interrogate him about a nigger named “Monster.” He showed the woman Monster’s death letter, suggested that she mind her own business and accompanied that with all types of sexual innuendo, though he could tell from her body language that she was the type to sue, raise hell.
Before Queenetta could pull her skirt down and get up from her chair, Stone had already beat the dummy, sharpened his pencil, signed the papers authorizing a visit to Monster, and spat liquid crack and crank in her face. Sizzurp. He showed her the door, stained with blood. She rose and walked out with a twitch. An animal hisself, into girls rather than women, he stared at her ass; her hairy arms and legs almost made him sick, throw up his hands.
“Don’t show your bloody face in this world again, Diamond,” he yelled, continuing to butcher her name. “You got no rights here, Asia, no right to stomp into my prison, my house, and play Oprah on me, you little trollop,” he yelled, knocking on wood, then slamming the steel door after she strutted out. “Have I ever dealt drugs, delivered these niggers poison, struck them, made them get on their knees and kiss my ass?” he said to himself. “Po-lease.”
Step off
Not wanting to get too close to Queenetta—to be face-to-face or violate her temple or some thang, Monster, used to mothafuckers normally tracking him down while he’s in meditation, swagged the forty of malt liquor that a freaky guard had slipped him and contemplated his 125-year stretch, leaning up against the wall like negroes did in the 60s, reflecting on his privileged position as a kind of jailed rainbow. A gang of men swallowing Doodads and cheese nips tiptoed by Queenetta’s stool and the entrance of the cell to peep him. (The cheap alcohol sank deep into his belly like black bile, making him feel extremely melancholy.)
Don’t go
“Check this out, there’s always a good reason to hit somebody or do some cutting up!” shouted a brother named Chris Rock, a stray in pen/pin stripes standing next to a crooked ofay/guard. He flaunted his jewels as the comedian in this story. The comic relief. The black comix of a very graphic tale. He fashioned himself as the white man’s assistant. He winked at Queenetta as a brutish guard yanked her by the arm, got up close to her, and then shook her down by the gate, feeling all over her, slapping her with his hands. Feeling further abused, Queenetta slowly got into her tired-looking BMW and cruised away. Even the ride she didn’t own. She played her friend Cassandra Wilson’s breakthrough CD New Moon Daughter in the car. (“Break my windows,” the BMW cooed while Queenetta’s eyes focused on the dark wheel, the turn back into the forest.) She inhaled a cheeseburger from Wendy’s, but immediately vomited into a large cup for a chocolate shake. “Me myself, I wouldn’t hit a woman or try to do her, but I would sure shake the hell out of her!” yelled Chris, making her motion sickness even worse.
Queenetta realized that she had to go through this trip again, but she spun away with an attitude, past the Stone addicts, wheeling a circle around a blue El D to the sounds of “Stormy Weather” growing louder, and Rock still hollering at her, asking if the late Eazy-E was like her play cousin. A ghost, Queenetta fled like the convicts, leaving the guard grinning, out of bounds and promising her that he wouldn’t pat her down the next time since her face would be familiar.
Psych
“A black person dying does not matter to white America—that is mere punctuation,” Monster from Brownsville redlined as if the prison system was his house. Every now and then shooting a glance at thug television, he was trying for a stretch again, seized by his own mettle frame and standing like a building tottering trembling falling down reeling for a reason that he was unaware of or did not know, the dry cuts and bruises on his ashy hands hurting him, a little drinky-drink from his Styrofoam cup running away as he gave her his lip music. Monster could go off like it was nothing. For this second conversation, the man, all swoll, was framing himself as the star in just cause. Acting much too cocky, trying to prove to her he had balls while underscoring his beef. But he intelligently picked his way through the memories to keep from tripping over one that might cost him too much. That was one thing Queenetta could tell as she braced herself on the stool.
“Did you ever do any black stuff?” Queenetta asked, her scrawny, light-skinned legs crossed as if really concerned about that hip-hop gobble-gobble and bold jive that black men are well-endowed. Queenetta kept asking herself why she came back to this place. She wanted the goddamn smoking gun. Climax. She wanted chocolate chip cookies and lemonade. She wanted dynamite, blow. She wanted the paperboy and the beast. She wanted joy; she wanted slime. She wanted a dime’s worth of hard stuff. She wanted flamethrowers, hot dope. She wanted Jerry Spring-her, sweet Jesus. She wanted Poppy, for heaven’s sake—she wanted him.
Don’t go
Story’s all in her head now
In the end, regret came too late for Queenetta’s blood. She raised the speaker, a Saturday night special that the crooked white guard—a back door—knew she had, up to her ear and blasted away, her gum completely red by the time she fell off the stool, propped herself back against the ironweeds, and quit talking, her deep cold/code blue fingernails shattered by the thick bars. Some click. It all happened too fast. She was too fast. She was too fast. That’s what the men would likely later testify to. How she fast.
The prison’s Dr. Feelgood ran into Monster’s cell with riot security and promptly pronounced Queenetta “dead on arrival.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Queenetta seemed to mumble before splitting her wig and going as if doing a reflection. “This is an awakening.” There was 15 bucks to her name—dollar bills stuffed and bulging in the bank between her breasts, and they poured like cream out of the wire bra that slowly and quietly had made her sick, had served as a lightning rod for her contact with all types of cancer.
The crooked guard stared in disbelief. He thought she would do Monster. Still, was a win-win.
“Tally ho,” said one nigga, inhaling the rubber cement from his shoes.
“Don’t go, and put a bullet in yo’ head / just turn yo’ life around instead,” Monster sung to Queenetta when she first staggered into his cell, exhausted, crying as she informed him that this white guard gave her his gun like a pimp from an Iceberg Slim novel, forcing her to perform. He did indeed sound like Lenny Kravitz from his music Circus. Queenetta turned away.
“Well, fuck you, then,” blood/Monster said, because in prison even Solomon sang. He was determined to prove the point that finding life after death was the only thing that mattered.
A war daddy who usually required white money for protection, Monster could not hear the rhythm of the march. The 911 and advanced guard signaling something wrong. Body snatchers, dead mouths, scrapers, smokers almost off the chain in their screaming about Queenetta’s cutting up, reaching out to her now, trying to get a last piece of her. A hip-hop group in the prison played like Eric B. and Rakim and followed the leader.
A rat, a snoop imitating Dr. Dre, offered his services.
But War-don was through with operations.
“Just write it up—there’s no secrets in the pen,” he said after his monkeys, a united front, told him what happened. “Miss Little Red Riding Hood had no business skating away from the Yellow Brick Road anyway. This all had better be stitched up by the time I return. Like Pam Grier with her titties hanging out, this black mama’s in prison now, a permanent fixture since she refused to put some grass under her.
“Bye, Felicia…Keisha, Jalissa, or whatever she was—what she got, Bitch deserved,” War-don said backwards. “She was crying and snotty and through the roof with that. The only time she stayed whisper-quiet was when she was happy to be flaunting that well-built body for prestige. Then she’d ride up on these cocky motherfuckers like her name’s Alexus.
“She shouldn’t’ve been sniffing around this hellhole. Her death’s drug-related. Not to mention all that homosecting/homosexting she was doing with her cell.”
Queenetta and Monster were the real victims, drama. That was the truth. However, the other black men in H, habit or hereafter, made noise with the heavy metal bars to celebrate this bright yellow woman’s passing, many of them dancing the Snake Hips as she bled and her stanky body secretions slowly entered their public or pubic spaces, tired flakes of light skin falling as reconstituted cocaine while the men gripped the bars to get a look at her ass being hurriedly hauled away on a cooling board. The dirty, bent safeguard now wore small black leather gloves while smothering the loose blood in a handkerchief in order to save it. “When I gave her my little gun, I never thought something like this would happen,” the white man whispered to himself. “But it’s all good.” She worked out better than a test sample.
Staring down the guard who quickly walked back past the entrance of his cell, Monster made a pact to do something horrible to the honky later. No one uses “honky” anymore, but Monster still thought about it. ‘Cause Queenetta would not have died without his help; he had treated her like she was a chickenhead and an oreo, a dreamer of the Dream. Sadly, she got provoked by fake jacks, bits and pieces of thug life that she simply couldn’t handle.
“If you can’t find justice, then you can’t find peace,” Monster had warned the sista, X-ing himself out like Minister Malcolm, his forehead pulsating while his pointing finger demonstrated how prison was simply institutionalizing colored people and block parties. Riker’s Island, the NYC’s main prison industrial complex, had become overloaded with funky people—you could smell them; they were packed inside the can like fish, slaves shipped from the Middle Passage, a scattered few of them trying to read and understand MLK or adapt to the conditions, but most of them content to laze around. Riker’s was fated, doomed, destined for holy terror.
Now that Queenetta, a real friend, was gone, went tits up, there was nothing left to look at. Monster shook his raised fist and stomped on his love seat (though it was difficult for those who never saw Monster to imagine a convict having a love seat) and listened to the sounds of Inner City singing “Good Life.” This would be the story that Monster would tell his next visitor: like himself and Malcolm, who they called “Satan,” Queenetta had realized that she would never be able to completely get over the memories of the bars, how her own soft white bones, those ribs, had trapped her, caged her for having an artificial heart.
Cause of death? Brain damage.
As God or Father Divine, Monster had tried to speak to Queenetta about her hearing, the danger of putting on white folks. Amid the shadows of his box and as the blind leading the blind, Monster felt for her. She was gone.
“May God rest her soul,” Monster murmured. Feeling the tattoo in his crotch area that said “Naked Gun,” Monster gazed around at the prisoners putting on a nigger show in the cells across from him. They were cracking up and cutting up. They were dancing with the devil and dancing up a storm, as if the ozone layer was giving up and white people were hunting for melanin. Monster swished several times. “Whitey got the juice,” Monster would tell Michelle Alexander, the next female writer from the Times, when the prison allowed him to have another visitor.
The media couldn’t wait to start climbing up and down his back. Tweet immediately became a Southern Hummingbird, saying “It’s me again.” Other reporters kept butting in. Black dude with a notepad and a No. 2 pencil rolling up on him in a wheelchair, paraplegic from a gunshot wound. “Cost me a fortune just to look this way,” the man said, “but what’s your story?”
“Beam me up, Scotty,” Monster said, this bipolar, motherfuckin’ nucker’s muscles rippling like The Incredible Hulk, a Marvel figure inspired by Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but now fracturing badly, under emotional di/stress, his shadow rising up against the wall behind him, his mind completely twisted. Psychologically scaring people. His face featuring a huge tear.
Feeling caught in the echo, War-don—surrounded, shielded, by his ninja turtles and robocops—along with the media, stood his ground and watched as inmates shouted “hootie who” and other forms of gangland talk. War-don hung next to a cowboy and the grass easily swayed and the bugs.
The man is a pimp, Michelle concluded. Hit it, she almost told him. She wanted him to get lost.
“Betcha if you try to throw me into these control units, into a bin, I’ll self-report or raze up, and I’ll stay fine,” Alexander said, close to flipping out by the fish tank while rapping to Stone-face like it was nothing, her brand of black feminism in reporting making her sound like Michele Faith Wallace, Mike Wallace’s ill/legitimate spawn doing 60 Minutes in his absence. “I might not be a superwoman, but, boy, it’s going to take a miracle to make me run.
“Never ran, never will,” she reiterated, seriously disturbed by all of this mass incarceration, the racial cast/e she saw when peeping their colonized and broken bodies. “I’m here because of Queenetta. Her shit inspires me. She’ll never be gone. There’ll be women like brown recluses with new names, independent ladies with stories even more telling of what they’ve been through. Of how black men, or white ones, couldn’t handle them despite all attempts to. And I refuse to skirt the issue. You better believe that.
“I’m on a mission,” Alexander spat. After being so tense, terse, like that, she rested her neck.
“You’d better train your ass in micrography then,” War-don told her, “’cause that’s the only way your shit’s going to get out. And don’t expect me to cover your ass.” He stared at Michelle good, wondering why shorty got her eyes on him. In his mind, girl looked too small to do anything; she was a non-motherfucking factor.
However, she acted like she was from Internal Affairs, insisting that she and Monster would be cool with each other and moving around his facility like she was a care package.
“Goddamn nigger got all kinds of spooks calling his name—he was never arrested, he was rescued,” Stone said, as if she wasn’t there, as if all the words were testament. As if invisibility remained a woman’s best/blessed asset.
“Don’t expect to find corrections here or something stupendously sexy,” War-don, discharging a pile of shit, told a hot pink skirt from Mother Jones. “Even little Fellatio [sic] dear couldn’t. There’s no good story that a writer like you can bleed from the pen.
“All we got is whore-or stories. Lifestyles of the poor and infamous.”
Stone/cold antagonist War-don leaned ovah to Monster and whispered: “You aware that bitch was high class before you attacked her sweet ass in the boneyard? Why you think we let you in the trailer for a visit? She was in rare form, a real piece of work. Really too high falutin for me, stepping around the issue in my office and peddling her where’s/wears/wares. Feet so swollen she could barely fit them into high heels. Her syndrome got ugly quick and was incurable. Heard she gave it to her baby, too. Boo!
“Just so you know…” War-don whispered, “behind closed doors, I harpooned that Sharkeisha. We had a whale of a time. Something evil told me to spear her. I mean, after all, using the Black woman is still the easiest way to get to the Black man. And she never saw what was coming because that’s how the Ninja does his thing.
“Of course you got all varieties of AIDS yourself, so what’s it matter?” War-don asked, part-wolf himself, diss/spite carrying that samo germ. He turned his butt around while screwing with Monster’s head. “How’s that sick shit for a twist ending?” War-don asked with skins on his lips.
Killing your number
(Genocide begins with killing one man or thot. In AmeriKKKa, wherever you find a bunch of souljas lined up, it takes something black-ish.)
Monsta. You could see the green light in his eyez. They stood their ground—misfits, blasphemers, liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers, idolaters—their eyes watching God, their big heads too cocky and drugged out and all about their vein attempts to show strength to feel fear. They couldn’t care less what this bad-ass, mystical Monster-ish nigga singing “Danger”—”watch yourself”—would do next. Been so long…they stood their ground and watched while the spirits filled Monsta up inside with mad shit, black power.
*
Whether it dawned on him or not, clicked in his head or ruined his nut, the lame war-don’s time spent serving as the prison’s mastermind was ovah. A maggot brain himself, he was done.
His lifeboat gone, a juice card not capitalized on, Monsta was turning into the Devil from Hell’s Kitchen back in the day. Satan. Saving face. Exchanging tit for tat. Schizo frenetic. Rampaging. Running riot. Monsta was something else now. Something to marvel at. He be the alternative version of The Thing, the strongest one there, except for those already dead, their souls on ice. Just chilling. Their having escaped the limbo room, the Island, the compound problem, the prison’s popular break area, which just could never stop being a dark place hiding the beast within. These slaves, de-segging themselves after they stopped searching for fresh meat, suddenly found religion, an escape route, and believed they were sittin pretty. Shipping themselves out, even tearing-up themselves, tryna write their own ticket before receiving any more visitors. Including friends busting out of their restraints like Whodini. Brothers passing time. Many of them carrying, getting involved in a throwdown with gate money, a few looking forward to taking it to the stall.
Too bad in actuality survival rates didn’t look good. As soon as some of these busters broke out the cooler, they got caught up in a game of hide-and-seek. They play hot and cold. Dogs becoming the hunter punishing them for violating the rules.
In the meantime, War-don learned, realized, that one drop of negro blood was all it took to be haunted for life. Infected with whatever they have. Those left at the big house would either soon be ghosting, or be a part of the block forever. This set of institutionalized homeboys would only live in infamy. In making history, they’d go down as a riot, as the language of the unheard: the brutal slaying of the clutter family and nobody or nothing brave enough to step in and stop it except for crimson curtains, all of the shade thrown by the writing on the walls disrespecting life, blood up against the wall like in the sixties—concealing slash marks, a once-fluid conversation or meditation on vengeance now congealed everywhere in the family/living room. A dead man’s hand lying next to a poker face. Mysteriously, some drywall covering up things, only wild bill remaining as evidence of how they gambled away their lives, a storyboard filled with holes from Hickok/Hitchcock. Their voices silenced, they’d go down, be reconstructed as suicidal, as gambling with mob violence and coming out on the losing end, the awful thud around brick—the audible snapping of deeply bruised, dark, d/ejected bodies either in the driveways or out in the field that had gotten enough rope to hang themselves.
They ended up a cesspool. Only wasted time and energy flowing into it. Their multiple mouths simply controlled by Death. Sharp bones jutting out of their thick skin. They became the marvels of dreadpool, a massive group believing themselves to be nothing more than fictional characters. And so, mad, they set out to kill their way across all of existence.
“I ain’t going nowhere,” War-don said, (e)strangely elated if not euphoric, downing skittles and picking up the vacated postage stamps, selling wolf tickets to anyone interested in seeing the show. “My job’s to ward off any trouble. Right now, there’s like 666 knives out there, hiding up their rectums so the violent ones can get in that ass.” War-don enjoyed talking shit, acting like museum security. Reanimated somehow, he was gettin off on that, his threads appearing to the convicts as something ripped off from the Banana Republic.
In the exercise yard, black Pinocchio with a club-foot, before attempting to flee, straight-up murders brown Jimmy Cricket, who’s been chirping. A case of house nigger brutally squashing field nigger. The rest of them squander their time waiting to see what the rabbits would do. Scrubs and punks from the 70s, 80s, refuse to pipe down. Niggers scared of revolution, caught in a hustle, needle each other. Burning up/wasting/killing/doing even more time. In the system long enough to see pigs fuck up. And entertain beefs. Big guns with bandits in sight. Black men making an ass of themselves. Pinocchio bites off one of the cats’ paws. Brothers dirty as fuck in the general population give a little whistle and got Dr. Black(orxist) in the pen running scared, creating a cream that changes his skin tone and his personality.
“Bars,” one dude rapped from behind closed doors. Bending to the will of others, the power of the people.
From the safety of their houses, the world of white people took part in streaming and gave Monster millions of hits. Monster could have hacked them but he swam on.
“Oh…my…God,” Stone said, imitating, irritating, even the sweet white women in sight practicing politeness, physically shaking in their shoes. “Such is life in the garden of captives.” Screams of death atwitter. In social media, this would be like watching dehumanization unfold in The Zoo Story, the bloody [story] of Peter and Jerry—that mechanical monkey Peter happy to bring Jerry down to his own savage level. Blacks having the audacity to fight Whites over territory in here. The Black Guerrilla Family thinking they can somehow break up the Aryan Brotherhood while they’re having an AB conversation.
This was the monster factory. Pure and simple. Chains of long sentences. Black bodies laboring, slaving away forever. Nothing but logorrhea among those jailed. A Not I, mouth admission/emission or discharge of guilt. A corplantation packed with dark meat on the chopping block. And a few dodos moving about the heavily populated/polluted X section as if this supermax for the worst of the worst had become the new Pelican Bay. Greedy guards counting their bones.
Evil lurked. Gargoyles casing the joint. Killjoys wanting something for nothing. All of them already written up. Every fiber of their being hungry to put their hands on fresh meat.
The omen: Black dogs ignored the Mexicans singing narcocorridos and tunneling out like El Chapo, the risk-taker. With the tide turning, a bloody moon prophesied their doom. Every body watched by that goddamn Voodoo Moon turning red like a swollen eyeball, a muscle guilty of lifting too much weight. Crips with bloodshot eyes refusing to beg for mercy or sympathy. Just the threat of violence scarier than anything. Got Black homosexual men clawing to get out. Every body labeled animalistic. Hyper-sexual beasts rapping to one another off the cuff like Supernatural, seemingly summoned by the Ouija or alive because of the Wishmaster. Slobs, family of blood to contend with. Slabs. Cold ground. Rock spiders everywhere. Stone as puppet master, and Frankenstein’s army a horde of Nazi zombies. White human beings that could care less if these animals suffer. In the mean time, Blackenstein has lost his limbs in the war, so he’s out looking for victims. “Be my victim,” he begs with prison honey all over him, crazy as hell. Something unnatural here. The fly in his pod transforming. Grizzly rage. It follows. Fiend without a face. Creep FX. A docile black law student seeking revenge on the busters who murdered him and his sister on Skid Row. Creature features. Criminals crying wolf and dancing around in black-and-white uniforms, caught up in the thriller of a flash mob. Correctional officers turned into witch hunters. The prison an abbey for those seeking refuge from the hell of the outside world. Some sort of alien outpost, the thing taking over folks’ bodies one by one. Inmates meeting at midnight falling prey to death by temptation. Death doing Time, too, doing nothing special really but chasing them.
Awakened by their music, their sad songs, Geretta Geretta, the banshee, screams for seconds and then tries to warn them from inside their cells in a dead tone. Later, she would tell the board in her own hearing, “Pardon me while I eat my young.” Listen to the cells at night when every thing’s on lockdown, all’s quiet, and you’ll catch the spirit of redemption hanging around, a haunting prostitute named Rosemary walking away from demonizing Black people any further. Queen of the Damned.