8.
Pops
Chained and handcuffed, I come by prison bus to Waupun Correctional Institution, labeled maximum security, a castle-like fortress built in 1851 in a remote part of the state. An officer hustles me off the bus and takes me directly to intake. I walk slowly, my head down, my hands cuffed in front of me. The officer urges me to pick up my pace. I don't. What's my hurry? I've got twenty-eight years.
I slouch down a narrow hallway, passing cells on either side. Medieval and mammoth looking from the outside, Waupun on the inside seems small, out of scale, built for tinier human beings born centuries ago. The prison smells and looks old. It feels as if it has never been updated.
Intake, I discover, will last a week.
And intake, I learn, means segregation.
I spend the week in a minuscule cell, a closet with bars, a bed, a toilet, a slit in the wall that passes for a window. I spend the first days going through the litany of indignities I've become accustomed to—medical exam, cavity search, a visit from the dick doctor. Then I go through a series of meetings with a prison counselor. She creates a file, fills in my religious affiliation and dietary restrictions, completes a psychological evaluation, lists any gang association. By her questions, I gather that she tries to make sure a cell doesn't house two vicious murderers or members from rival gangs. Before I receive my cell assignment and enter into the general prison population, she hands me a file containing all my paperwork, including police and court transcripts and a letter from the appellate attorney who has been assigned to my case. Finally, she informs me that I am required to enroll in a program for sexual predators.
 "I'm not going to do that," I say.
"You refuse?"
"Yes."
I look her in the face.
"I don't need that program. I am not a sexual predator."
She clicks her pen several times, shrugs. "Your choice. Your record."
***
I get placed in the very first cell at the front of the north wing, on the bottom of six tiers, close to the guard who lets people in and out through an automatic door. I walk into the tiny five-by-nine space, holding everything I own against my chest. My roommate, a tatted-up, scowling hulk twice my size, studies me. We don't speak. I climb to the empty top bunk. I know immediately that I can't stay in here twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes a day. I need to get a job. I have to keep myself busy, or I will go insane.
It takes a little time, but I get placed working in the kitchen as a waiter, an ironically fancy title meaning that I stand behind a counter and put milk cartons and juice boxes onto trays. I must be good at this because whoever's in charge promotes me to food server. Three or four times a week, I sling lumpy hash, runny eggs, and unidentifiable globs of gruel onto plates. On mornings when I work breakfast, I get up at five. I don't mind. Having a work pass gets me out of my cell. I soon move even further up the food chain. One day the guy running the kitchen tells me I'm being wasted as a server. He promotes me to chef. I think about how I used to help my grandmother cook our meals in the Big House. I'm back in another Big House, the one where you walk in and don't leave for twenty-eight years. I would die of shame if my grandmother ever saw me inside these walls.
***
Stay safe and stay sane.
My mantra. My life's goal.
I work as a cook four times a week and alternate my rec time playing basketball with the younger guys, most with gang tattoos on their necks and faces, and playing chess with the older guys, most with long beards. I like that look, and because the razors the guards give us couldn't cut paper, I decide to grow a beard of my own. My aunties continue sending letters and copies of Bible verses. One of them buys me a subscription to the Chicago Sun-Times, my hometown paper. Each issue arrives a day late, but I don't care. I devour the paper, front to back, linger over the sports, following the Cubs, Bears, and Bulls, the only way I can tell when the seasons change. And I write my mother often. I don't call. I can't.
The prison rotates cellmates. One day, the scowling, tatted-up hulk packs up his stuff and leaves. I sleep alone in the cell for one night, and the following morning my new cellmate painfully lumbers in. He's tall, thick-bodied, and older, at least sixty, a white guy with thinning gray hair and a flabby paunch. He arrives with a companion, a portable oxygen tank. He breathes hard and coughs often. We nod to each other. We don't speak. People call him Pops. Because my previous cellmate left, I'm entitled to the bottom bunk. But I look at Pops, his oxygen tank with its tubes, oxygen mask, and accompanying tray filled with medications, and I don't see how he could make it up to the top bunk.
"I got the top," I say.
"Thanks," he says.
Those five words constitute our entire verbal communication for the first two weeks.
Partly, we don't speak because we rarely see each other. I get up before five for my job in the kitchen. Pops runs the law library. While I'm celled up in the afternoons, he's out. On the yard, during rec time, while I'm playing basketball, Pops, if he's there, sits by himself and reads. At night, we both read on our bunks, or if I'm not reading, I listen on my headphones to the only radio station on my radio that plays rap. I love everything by 2Pac, especially his album Me Against the World. I identify with 2Pac—young, Black, disposable, and sent to prison on a rape allegation. Songs like "Me Against the World" and "Dear Mama" rip me up. He could have written them about me. After lights out, I see 2Pac's lyrics before my eyes and I memorize every line. Then I try, desperately, to will myself to sleep. But between my anxiety and anger at being in here and Pops's violent snoring, I seldom manage more than three hours of sleep and never in a row.
***
One night, around ten, I sit up on my bunk, lost in a book. Suddenly the outside door buzzes. A cell door clanks open. Loud voices fill the hall. Footsteps thump toward us. I jump down and find Pops, reading on his bunk.
"What's going on? You got a visitor?"
"No. They're doing a cell search. Looking for weapons."
I panic.
"They must've heard something," he says.
I have a weapon. Pops knows it. He's seen it. I've stuffed two locks into a sock, a common weapon in here. I've never used it. I pray I never will. If the guards find my weapon, we will both go into the hole.
I reach up to my bunk, shove my hand under my pillow, and grab the sock.
"Give it here," Pops says.
"What?"
"Give it to me."
I hesitate.
"Come on."
I hand it to him just as two guards appear outside our cell door.
 Pops starts coughing, a sudden roaring death rattle of hacking. He makes his face flush red.
A guard unlocks our cell door, flings it open with a clang.
"What—what's going on?" Pops says between coughs. "I was just getting ready to take my medication."
"We'll make this quick," the guard says.
"You're searching our cell? Are you serious? Why are you doing that? You know we don't have anything in here. I'm an old man and he's a kid."
The guards ignore him. They start rooting through our stuff, our sheets, our books, everything. Pops revs up his coughing, holds on to the cell bars for effect.
"At least can I get some water?" He hacks up some fake phlegm. "I'm dying."
"Yeah, yeah," a guard says, looking disgusted. "Go."
Pops clutches his oxygen tank, steers it out of our cell, and heads down the hall toward the nurse's station. I realize then that he has hidden my weapon on the food tray he's taken with him, stashed it among a balled-up paper bag and his medications. A moment later, I see him standing hunched over the nurse's station, sipping water from a plastic cup.
"Spread your arms," a guard says to me.
I do. He pats me down.
"Do you speak?" the other guard says.
I shrug.
"He's clean," the first guard says. "Let's move on."
"You know what'll happen if you get caught with a weapon?" the second guard says up in my face.
I shrug.
"You don't want to know."
***
August. Dog days. The heat stifles me. Pops, a large man, a sick man, suffers in the heat. He breathes abnormally. He pants. At night, his coughing jags increase.
 One day, while I'm playing hoop, the siren sounds, bleating a staccato, head-banging alarm. An order screams through the loudspeaker. Everyone, go back to your cell. Nobody hesitates. We go. The older guys scatter, abandoning their chessboards, leaving kings and castles in mid-battle. I return to my cell, find Pops hyperventilating in the brutal heat. He presses a plastic Hannibal Lecter mask over his face, sucking down oxygen.
"Suffocating in here," I say, splashing water from our sink on my face, under my arms. I start to climb up to my bunk. I look at Pops, in obvious discomfort, his chest heaving, and I say to myself, "Breathe, Pops, breathe."
We go on lockdown. Rumors fly. We hear that a guy slipped in a puddle of blood, running to his cell. We hear somebody got shanked up on the yard, took a knife between the ribs. We hear a rival gang selected a hit man to settle a score. Then we hear the truth. Some treacherous dude doing life, who was mopping the floor, got into a beef with a tier runner, a guy who passes out phones when you get a call. The dude with the mop went crazy on the tier runner, used the mop like a baseball bat, bludgeoned the tier runner, beating him over and over, knocking out his eye.
The lockdown stays in place for three straight days, all of us going stir-crazy in the heat. The prison rocks with complaints, shouts, cups banging on bars. Then, gradually, a day at a time, guards let out those of us with jobs. One night, I hear that I have a phone call, and a tier runner passes me the phone through our trap in the bottom of the door. I answer the phone, hear my aunties' voices patched together.
They ask first about my health. I mumble something vague, then ask about my mother.
"Why don't you call her and ask her yourself?"
"I know. I should. I will. I—"
I stop.
"What?"
"It's hard. I'm so ashamed. I feel like I hurt her so much."
"She's strong," Honey says.
 We both know that's not true.
"She just wants to know you're all right," Sugar says.
Honey changes the subject. "What's going on with your case?"
"I'm waiting on appeal," I say, and then I go into the best description of the case that I can, which sounds flimsy because I really don't know much myself. As I speak, the frustration starts to grip me, and I blurt, "I got railroaded, you know that. I'm innocent. I would never…rape…anyone. Ever. That didn't happen. If I had a lawyer like Rovaughn has, maybe things would be different. But this is so hard. Because it's wrong."